I thought about you today, but only with fondness, not for you — you have become weirdly irrelevant on your own — but because you are why I am here; here breaking a pattern, here shattering a limit, here reminding myself of who I am, here mastering my darkest and weakest parts… all of that because you appeared at a juncture that felt like my end.
We only have so many of those in a lifetime, the things we look back on and say, “How did I get through that?” And of course I did. I am a walking embodiment of what it means to rise.
And as I thought about the person I was before you broke me, I realized that those are the moments we would not choose but that choose us.
If someone told me I would have to break in that way to become the thing I am walking toward, I might not have endeavored. In that sense, the thing happened as it should have, or I would not have grown into this.
So, before I walk into another place that asks me to prove myself, I want to establish one thing that will make that certain: I am a provable entity. I never fail myself.
This day is a testament to that, but I will walk out the other side with the only one certainty I had before I entered in the first time: I am the thing I can count on.
If I get out having given all of myself, having held on through the faltering moments, that is the truest part of who I am. What comes of the test is secondary to that, because prep is just a cluster of days, but that, that knowledge of my own certainty, that is forever.
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 at passthebar@barnoneprep.com.
