Throughout undergrad and law school, I used to joke that I felt like there was a guy with a torch in my rear view and he was gaining on me by the second. The only way I can give a meaningful visual to this feeling is to describe what threat I was trying to escape. At the end of every semester, you got your grades and someone evaluated your basic worth, or at least I thought so. Every term I felt like my full self was up for review and I was terrified I would be annihilated from the inside out by any flaw the evaluation revealed.
Three weeks before my bar exam and with my whole retirement fund ($5,000), I left my job of about 15 years at a car dealership to study for real. I was a single mom of one son. This job made our life stable. But it was less of a life than I thought I could have, and I knew I was the best shot my son had at something greater than I had in my childhood. So, I jumped, without a parachute, out of my job and into the void of late-in-the-game full-time bar prep. With the urgency and the significant potential threat of what not passing the bar would do to us, (no need to discuss what I had to do to get through law school leading up to that point), it’s safe to say a lot was on the line. I was the “what if I don’t pass?” student personified, except I never dared to entertain that question because it would have crushed me under its weight. I really needed to focus on the work to pass. And in those moments, I created the raw version of the course I now teach.
But it’s worth talking about the person I had to be leading up to my test. It would be easy to wax on about the difficulties of undergraduate studies, law school, and bar prep as a single mom with two jobs, and $100,000 (or so) in student debt. Those are easy sympathy points and I have come to learn, after decades of teaching this test, not so uncommon hurdles. No, that’s not the story here. The real struggle I had was with me, not my life conditions. I was one of those people that wanted to be measured not by mere excellence but by another level beyond extraordinary, because something in my wiring made me feel like I had to be extraordinary to be worthwhile at all. Good enough was not good enough. There was no “hard for the regular person,” or “hard for the single mom,” or “hard for the person with tough beginnings,” or “hard for the person with lots of responsibilities.” I had to research complex topics, publish law review articles, and enter writing competitions. I had to attend day classes full-time while working full-time in the margins. I had to surpass the Dean’s List and make it to the Dean’s Scholars list. I was the classic zero-sum overachiever. But I want to tell you I never reached a last “good-enough” thing, and sadly, I never sat in the thing I just did long enough to feel it. And that guy with the torch, he just kept running at a faster and faster clip. By graduation, I felt for sure he was going to finally catch me, and by my bar exam I felt certain he would reveal me as the fraud I feared I was. One day I shared this feeling with a friend who kindly informed me that the guy with the torch was me; I was the guy at my back and gaining. It was me.
In the years that passed, having learned that bar prep is my super-power and my mission work, I have come to lay my own torch down, because I have arrived where I was going and I don’t feel the need to prove anything anymore. But oh boy was that a long journey. It’s also why I do this work. You are my people. Now my job is to take on your torch.
Please hear me when I say this thing is hard enough without what you are doing to yourself. Every bar exam brings its own energies of people and personalities and indeed you are all mostly overachievers, some of you much more like I was, running fast away from some guy chasing you with a torch, that elusive ideal of “good-enough.” If this resonates, you know who you are. I wrote this with you in mind. But even if you are not one of those super-wired over-achievers, you didn’t get to law school as a slacker. At the very best, most of you harbor some fear that you are an imposter.
Nearly all of you feel just shy of good enough. But by now, I beg you to reposition that thought.
At every step in this journey, starting with your LSAT, you were slightly underqualified and had to painfully grow into the next rung, same with law school. And yet, you figured it out and came out the other side. I hate to break it to you, but when they give you the license you will still not be quite up for lawyering. That takes a few years. But you will have the knowledge that someone gave you a license. You have as much right as anyone else to be there, and you will have to coast on that, your history, and your raw self-belief until you are up for lawyering.
During bar prep, which is an exercise of extreme human effort, any weakness in the chain of self-belief begins to threaten the whole integrity of its soundness. So, I want to assure you that by any objective standard (by now you fully understand what one of these is!) YOU ARE WORTHY. You have proven your right to sit for this test. You graduated from an accredited law school, you filled out an application to your jurisdiction’s bar, they accepted you to sit for this test, and I hope you did “most” of the work. You have the significant advantage of a superior resource. You have been coached by someone not only able but as hard on herself as you are on you. You are more prepared than anyone else in that test center. And I know you all want to give me the confessional about what you actually did versus what I assigned. Trust me, I know before you step in front of the curtain. No one does perfect prep.
But here’s what I know: if you showed up and you did what that day allowed every single day, and you fought for every question on the exam, hold onto that as its own win. The results are literally not your business right now and they are not relevant. They are another’s day’s story. Today you took a bar exam. You win.
Let the guy with the torch catch up to you. Put your arm around him and take the torch. Now hold it in front of you and let it light your way. You don’t need him chasing you anymore.
Deborah Sanders is the owner of Bar-None Prep and has taught the bar prep method she created for her own bar exam for over twenty years. She is based in New Jersey. In addition to a regular column on NationalJurist.com, she is writing a book on “The Spiritual Path to Passing the Bar.” You can contact her atpassthebar@barnoneprep.com.
