The count down timer I’ve (perhaps unwisely) installed on my desktop says that I now have 90 days until classes begin.
Today I went to the bookstore and read a small Kaplan book on other people’s perspectives during the first year. There were so many conflicting reports: buy the hornbooks, don’t buy the hornbooks, be terrified because it will help you work harder, don’t worry and you’ll do better, be wary of your classmates because they will try to trip you up, the workload is tremendous and NOTHING ON THIS EARTH CAN PREPARE YOU FOR THE SHOCK.
Okay, that’s great. Fear can be a healthy motivator. Eventually I will figure things out and learn the best study method for myself. But my emotions are what concern me. My whole life they’ve been kind of magnified, and if I’m completely blindsided by something awful that affects me on a deep and personal level, I will cry about it. I’m getting better, but it’s still completely impossible for me to say, “Cheer up and smile and you’ll get past it.” It doesn’t work that way for me.
Crying it out is the best solution because I do it and then it’s over and I feel a huge sense of relief before I dust myself off and start making lists, planning on how I can make things better. But my biggest fear in going into this isn’t that I’ll fail, or that I won’t understand (even though I am scared of those things like everyone else)–but that I’ll cry in class. I don’t cry out of fear or sadness, but rather a sense of anger and frustration with myself for not understanding. And that could be a problem. One that I’m being given the opportunity to work on, however. Something someone said in that book made sense to me: everyone else is going to be so wrapped up in themselves and their problems that they probably won’t even realize that you’ve made a mistake or that you are being humiliated.
So if the Socratic Method is what they use in law school, so be it. I will roll with the punches and learn to duck and dodge with just a bit of skill rather than to tense up and try to avoid it unsuccessfully. I have to treat every class like being on a stage and be totally ready to perform for the worst critics. Planning ahead and preparing myself emotionally is probably going to be the best coping mechanism for me this summer. I have several books that all claim to know the for real deal on 1L, but for me, learning how to hold out grace under fire is something I’ve been needing to–not learn, but enhance or refine as a pretty good life skill.
I don’t plan on making this into a sob blog–I’d much rather talk about what I’m learning. Older students who are coming back into the fold have a remarkable advantage over those of us who are still young and inexperienced: as much as you all might think we still have the energy and competitive drive to do this, you have years of good and bad behind you. You’re able to deal with shit much more nimbly and with a moderation of feelings that I think being young just doesn’t afford us. I think older students can look at the whole “dramatic terror of law school” with a more detached eye and recognize that life goes on. You pick yourself up and move on, because three years are just a drop in the bucket.
