Bar Thoughts: Part III

Personal Struggles

The worst part of the buildup to the exam isn’t so much the fear of failure, but the fear of the unknown. There’s the fear of the unknown on what’s going to be on the test. And because we don’t know what’s exactly going to be tested, we have to be prepared for everything. We know that there are six subjects tested in the multiple choice portion of the test. But with the six essay questions, they could be on anything. It could be on something I know really well (criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, community property) or it could be something I absolutely detest (real property). There’s also the fear of the unknown in terms of actually taking the test. You can take all the practice tests that you want and put yourself under time pressures, but there is nothing really quite like actually having to perform on game day.

I fancy myself as a pretty confident guy. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t really freak out about much in my life. Well…not this time. The first 1.5 months of bar studying weren’t so bad. I still lived life a little. I watched the Lakers win their second championship in a row. I generally took Sundays off to just decompress and honor the Sabbath by not working at all. But since July 4, its been full bore for me. 10-12 hours a day 7 days a week. Meals that last about 30 minutes at most. Wakeup. Study. Eat. Study. Eat. Study. Sleep. Repeat. Days began to meld together because they all looked the same. Have you ever studied so much that you would forget what you just studied? Countless nights, as I was going home from the library, I would totally forget what I was studying. I would get a little scared, then sleep on it, and wake up the next morning remembering everything that I studied the night before. Weird, right?

Just throughout the process, I didn’t really get frustrated. I felt like I was being productive in my studying. I was improving my writing and my exam taking. By all objective indicators, I was always where I needed to be, or even ahead. But throughout the months studying, there was always the creeping thought in the mind: what if I didn’t prepare enough or study enough? What if that ONE THING I didn’t really take as seriously comes up on the bar? How stupid would I feel? And that line of thinking would also pervade my thoughts during the time I took off from studying. I would feel guilty about taking time off instead of studying and be wondering about law. I guess I should take time to explain to those who were around me during that time the reason why I tended to have this blank vacuous look. It’s probably because I was thinking about rules of law, and going over stuff in my head, even as I was physically away from the books.

One of the worst things about studying is that I didn’t have time for anything else. I’m not one to really be a social butterfly and be out and about all the time, but I do enjoy hanging out. I love going to the occasional game or partaking in a meal of food. I enjoy the random times of just playing or just chilling or grabbing a beverage and talking about (non-law related) things. Yeah…that was totally cut out from my life. I think at one point, I literally did not eat with anyone other than my family for a month.

A related difficulty is the loneliness that comes about because of isolation from the outside world. When John Donne wrote that “no man is an island,” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about people studying for the bar exam. I’m a pretty independent guy and I’m actually a natural introvert. But I’m definitely not a “one man wolfpack.” I do need contact with the outside world. Waking up, spending all day in the library, then going back home doesn’t help that. I know a lot of people deactivated their Facebooks and stopped using Gchat or AIM during bar season. I really couldn’t do that. I needed to at least SOME contact with the outside world. And keeping those things was worth it, even if that meant Jacob Han distracting me with girl talk, getting notifications that someone put up vacation pictures on FB, or being entertained by random status messages.

I was getting so stressed about the test that it hurting my health. About 1 week before the exam, I was having trouble breathing. My chest would be very tight and my blood pressure and pulse was unusually high. I had to continue fighting through that with the knowledge that, after the bar, I really needed to take some time off to take it easy. From two weeks before the bar right until the eve, I was dreaming about law. I would dream fact patterns. I would dream black letter law. I would dream of me, standing up in court, and arguing why “Patty” should recover on a particular theory. I’m sure glad that the bar was the last week of July. At least a couple of times the week before the exam, I had real trouble sleeping and would go into “panic mode.” I would start thinking that I didn’t know an area of law, and get really scared all of a sudden. Needless to say, a couple more weeks of that preparation and I may have had serious long-term damage to my physical and mental health.