The Bar Exam Gets One Last Hit

It was a happy mail day, indeed! I passed the Massachusetts Bar Exam! However, my mail comes late in the day and so most of Saturday, as I waited for my mail, was brutal. One last test to my sanity.

I had been growing more and more frustrated and anxious as the days and hours passed by. To distract myself from having a The Riddler-like breakdown, I set about trying to accomplish manual tasks. First, my shoes. That took three days and mostly because I spent the work day gnawing at myself and trying to escape my own thoughts and by the time I got home I was well and truly done being awake. For Saturday, D-Day, I would need a tedious task that I would absolutely have to finish within the same day or else, which basically means finish or perish. Aha, my kitchen! I’m talking moving everything but the fridge and oven (because I’m neither Hagrid nor Hodor), washing cabinets, double mopping and everything in between. But I wasn’t prepared for the double onslaught Saturday would bring – I was physically ill and borderline overwrought all day. As I set about to begin my kitchen task, I was frequently distracted by an errant thought about the bar and had to chant “I passed, I passed, I passed…” over and over to replace the potentially negative thought, or worse, the “what if?” thought.

By noon I had enough. I forced myself out of the house so I would stop jumping every time I thought I heard the sound of mail dropping into my mailbox. On my sojourn to Five Guys and the pharmacy, I honestly thought I was going to black out many, many times. I have never taken so many deep breaths in my life! The music in my earbuds could not be loud enough and the normal pleasure of people watching seemed more like an out of body experience where I was in the world, but not of the world. When I got home, my letter had arrived.

I debated… “to open or no to open?” I actually thought about not opening it at all. I wondered who I could call to come and open it for me and why I hadn’t thought of that idea sooner. My heartbeat was so loud in my ribcage and up through my ears and I could feel the thump-thump, thump-thump in the tip of my nose. Everything was loud and quiet at the same time. In a moment of remarkable courage for all the shit flying through my mind in that moment, I opened the envelope.

I passed. “Congratulations.” Read the first sentence. And I read it again, and again ten more times. I had to be sure. I had to be certain there was no mistake. The letter goes on to read “you have passed the written examination for the Massachusetts Bar Exam” and I’m thinking… “so…I only passed the essays?” So I read it again for good measure, and it’s true, I passed. I finally passed!!

I alerted the necessary people in my life of my achievement and cried for at least two hours out of sheer relief. Relieved that I don’t have to try and find the strength to do this again, because I truly think that reservoir is drained dry. Relieved that I can have my life back (whatever that means) now that I am out of this holding pattern and relieved that I can move forward in my career. I am a realist and so I know that finding a lawyer job is likely going to be the subject of my ranting, and being a lawyer is hard work, and that some areas of law are truly depleting to the soul in practice; but that really doesn’t matter because the biggest hurdle is dust I am now a soon to be sworn in attorney and I get to make the most of it.

Lastly, I am very happy to share this happy time with several friends and classmates who have also struggled with the bar exam and smashed it this time!

~NV~