I am a bar exam failer. Nearly two years ago, I, like you, fruitlessly scanned the list of numbers to find that one had been omitted. Mine. 364.
“Maybe I had the wrong number!” I thought, as if I could
possibly have somehow mistaken the number that appeared in literally every form
imaginable in my dreams for the last 2 months. I, like you, frantically
searched through my bar exam book box on which I had unceremoniously scrawled, “see
you in hell” at the end of July. Pulling
out my plastic baggie with my timepiece, a thousand pencils, a small lucky
rubber coyote (obviously), and a gigantic white label with my number clearly
printed on it. 364.
So it was true, I had failed.
If your day was anything like mine, it started with stress
baking 5 dozen zucchini muffins and ended with lots of vodka and possibly a
little vomiting. Don’t tell my mom. In
the middle there may or may not have been a part where you cried for an hour on
the floor of your kitchen, then spent the next two writing back to all the
inquisitive and then awkwardly encouraging texts. I personally chose to go with the thumbs down
emojii. Or the skull. Or the alcohol bottle. People got the
picture. They stopped texting. No one
knows what to say.
Because what can you say?
Here’s how you feel: this is the worst day of your life. Nothing worse can ever happen to you. This is
not correct, obviously, but it’s all you can think about right in this
moment. This is a total disaster. How will you ever recover from this? You can never go on.
But of course you will go on, you can go on, and here are
some things to keep in mind:
1. This is not about you.
You are lovely, clever, smart, and interesting. You have hobbies and interests. Maybe you like sports. Or you have a really nice garden. Or you are an excellent chef. Or you are very well-read. Or you’re big on twitter. So you had a
miss. A bad day. An arbitrary number does not change who you
are. You are not "the girl who failed the bar exam." You are not your score. You are a person who struck out the first
time at bat. You studied and wrote
practice essays and stayed up all night making flashcards and some yayhoo who
told you at the hotel that he just hadn’t had a chance to look at Contracts yet
is getting sworn in next month. This is
spectacularly unfair. You are right, and
this brings me to my second point.
2. The Bar Exam is spectacularly unfair. You’ve been saying it all summer, and you are
not wrong: why do we need to memorize this when at work I will have books and
google to find out what I need to know? (If my boss is reading this, just
kidding, I never google legal terms I can’t remember.) The Bar Exam is a terrible horrible right of
passage thought up by mean horrible people who do not have your best interest
in mind and merely want to torture you as they themselves were tortured by
multiple choice questions with four wrong answers asking you to choose the “most
correct” or an essay on corporate voting (still mad about that). The Bar Exam has absolutely no bearing on
whether or not you will be good at being an attorney. You have many other qualities and
characteristics that will make you good at your work. You are caring, conscientious, tenacious, and
thorough and no multiple choice question on the difference between robbery and
burglary can discern that. But the
people you help will know that. And they
will never care if you know the difference between robbery and burglary. Unless they are burglars.
3. You have not let anyone down. You haven’t even let yourself down because you
tried. You took the chance, you put yourself out there, and you weren’t afraid
to fail. You suffered and succeeded
through three long years, culminating in the worst summer of your life (good
news: next summer will be the best by virtue of sheer comparison), because you
aren’t afraid to try to do something hard.
You know how many people don’t even try?
Thousands. Millions maybe. But you did.
And you know what? Everyone is
proud of you. So many of your friends
and family members cannot even fathom doing what you’ve done and you did
it. The Bar Exam is hard. No one doesn’t believe that. Your classmates that are celebrating right
now fully believe, and most are correct, that they passed by the skin of their
teeth and are shocked they did. No one
thinks badly of you because you failed.
No one is upset. Your friends are
still proud of you. Your mom still loves
you. And the good news is that for the
next sixth months, people are going to continue to go out of their way to be
really nice to you. Some of those are
because they saw you have an absolute crying breakdown over a compliment one
day this summer, or they ran into you at the library and you had eight pencils
in your hair and your sweatpants were covered in highlighter marks. But all of
those are because they love you. I am
now, two years later, finally to the point where I can crack a joke about
failing the bar, and you know what my friends do? They feel awkward and smile encouragingly and
fall all over themselves to be nice about it.
Still. Everyone loves you and no one
sees you any differently today than they did yesterday.
4. There will never be anything worse than failing the Bar
Exam. The Bar Exam is easily without a
doubt the most public way you can fail at something everyone knows you were
trying to do. Your facebook statuses all
summer have been about your horrible miserable exam anxiety. You went the whole month of July without
seeing another human being that wasn’t delivering a pizza. “Can’t do (insert awesome fun activity), I’m
studying for the bar,” you told countless numbers of people this summer. And then they go and post a damn list on the
internet. Even your grandma can read
that, if she’s particularly good at computers or you have a mean cousin. But the good news is, this is the worst that
can happen. Let’s face facts, for a lot
of you, this is probably the first time you’ve really failed at something. You’re
probably going to be pretty gun shy and the idea of trying things is not very
appealing to you right now, I get that.
But when the smoke clears you’ll see that, why the hell not? If you try something (a job, a relationship,
a new city) and
it doesn’t work out, so what? You’ve
failed before. You can handle this. You will not die because you failed the bar
and you will not die if living in Trenton,
New Jersey doesn’t work out. Which, let’s just face it, it’s Trenton. Maybe give that one a pass. Try and succeed? Great.
Try and fail? Oh well. Move onto the next plan.
5. There will be many many things worse than failing the Bar
Exam. I know it's impossible to see right now, but at the end of the day, it is just
a test. A stupid, horrible, evil, dark
test, yes, but a test. In life, awful
things will happen, sad but true. Your
marriage may end, you will lose beloved family members and pets, you may have
an illness or an accident, your house may burn down, they may cancel Mad
Men. Most if not all of these things
will be worse than the day you failed the Bar Exam. You will get through those, and you will get
through this.
Mostly anymore, I don’t even think about it. I have given up glazing over the details of
why I didn’t get sworn in until the Spring after I graduated instead of the Fall. I’m not even upset when I’m facebook stalking
and see pictures from the swearing in that should have been mine. I stopped wondering if things would have been
different if I passed. Sometimes I’m
even glad that I failed the bar on my first go round. It’s not a wake up call or a warning sign or
any cliché people will throw at you in the next few days and weeks. All it is is something that happened to you
once. A small glitch in your life plan
that was undesired and unanticipated, but ultimately overcome.
The good news is, the second time is quite a bit
easier. It’s winter, so no one will be
tempting you with fun activities, and if you get snowed in, it might as well be
with a day full of barbri lectures. It’s
hard sure, but you’ve already proven that you can do hard things. And ironically, when you do pass, you’ll
probably end the day with lots of vodka and possibly a little vomiting.
So wallow this weekend, then put it behind you and onto the
next one. Because what’s the worst that
could happen, you could fail? Please.
Bring it on.
