Two months ago, I graduated near the top of my class in law school and earned my J.D., so everyone has told me, “I’m sure you will do fine on the bar exam” and “I have no doubt you’ll pass.” But the bar exam and its preparation have been really humbling because there are a lot of days I do well, but other days when I don’t do well. I was wrong to think I would do well on the bar exam simply by doing well in law school — I have had to really dig in and pretty much treat it like a full-time job.
Yesterday, I had a great day studying for the bar exam that I am taking at the end of July. I scored well above what I needed to pass on a three-hour multiple-choice practice exam. I was rushed with all sorts of euphoria, and started thoughts of confidence and borderline arrogance:
However, only the two days before, I had days where my scores went down and I didn’t do so well. I took a long practice set where I stumbled through the whole set and concepts I had just understood very well the week before were all of a sudden becoming difficult for me to understand. I read over the prompts three or four times, only to have no clue what was going on in the passage.
On the other end of the spectrum, catastrophizing thoughts of doom and panic started to spiral in my head:
Tomorrow could be a good day of studying. It could be a bad day. Like many of my classmates, there is a lot of variance in my bar exam scores on a day-to-day basis. I also have huge streaks — I will get 10 or 11 questions in a row right, seeming to be unstoppable.
Then, I’ll encounter a hard question or concept I don’t understand very well, then get eight to nine questions in a row wrong. Often, these negative streaks are extremely frustrating because I will narrow the answer down to two choices, then choose the wrong one, or I will change my answer but the original answer will be correct.
Apparently, this is also not very uncommon, and there is a psychological element of being frustrated and then having this frustration carry on to the next several questions, making it hard to move on.
I rationally understand that good days, bad days, and streaks are part of the bar exam. They are also a huge part of life. The part I struggle with is the emotional fluctuations that come with them.
I would rather be a huge stoic and not have these huge highs and huge lows. Unfortunately, I cannot force not feeling these feelings and being elated after a strong practice set or a day where I feel like I understand everything, and feeling devastated when I don’t.
. . .
My college cross country coach often advised us, “don’t get too high on your highs, and too low on your lows.”
The bar exam is just one part of my life right now. Getting too high on my highs and too low on my lows has been a recurrent theme throughout most ofmy career as a marathon runner.
When I first started running, 16 years ago in middle school, I felt like running was my whole life. Sure, I had a social life and I had school. I tried hard in both. But I didn’t assign the same emotional significance to both as I did to my running. I would think all day about a race I had coming up, and be nervous about that race all day, unable to concentrate to the best of my ability in school.
I would have a lot of bad races where I did not race to my expectations. I felt like I had disappointed everyone. I felt like I had disappointed myself. I would spend my whole day devastated. I would even do a second run after a bad race without my coach’s permission because I was so upset and angry at myself, which I would later learn was counterintuitive. I should have let it go and just moved on to the next day, but that, at the time, was a lot easier said than done.
On the good days, when I ran a personal best, I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt a euphoria better than any drug could provide. Leveling up at running meant I had leveled up at life, as a person.
I could not apply the mantra of “don’t get too high on your highs, and too low on your lows.” The same trend would often apply to workouts, where a good workout would make my day, while a bad workout would ruin my day.
This trend would continue from high school into my junior year in college, and I really struggled to break out of the mindset that how I ran would make or break my day.
I did try to game my emotional regulation a bit — I tried, at times, to ride the euphoria of the good days while being able to shake off the bad. But this was a slippery slope that just didn’t work — it’s not that I couldn’t celebrate successes, but thinking the success was the end of the journey and the defining moment naturally opened the door to the opposite and taking running too seriously.
. . .
Maybe it’s the writer in me, but a huge part of why this happens, I sense, is my tendency to try to find meaning in everything. Everything needs to have a lesson and meaning. This translates to a successful day and endeavor being a sign that I did everything right and that I found the right formula and approach. A bad day means I’m a failure and did everything wrong, which is why things didn’t work out.
The reality is obviously a lot more nuanced and complicated. There are factors beyond my control that led to either success or failure. Maybe I didn’t sleep well. Maybe, on the bar exam, I just got hit by a ton of hard questions. Maybe I got hit by a lot of easy questions. As a runner, sometimes, the weather is terrible and it’s too hot, humid, or windy to run fast. Sometimes, the weather is ideal and I found the perfect day to run a good time.
That’s the one factor I can never truly account for: luck. The saying goes that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I don’t think that’s always true. Sometimes, shit just happens, and there is nothing that can be done to control it. I can’t will the weather getting cooler and less humid, nor can I really control the topics that will be tested on the bar exam, even if I try to predict it.
One bad race as a runner usually did not mean anything. It could have just been a bad day. But three, four, five bad races in a row where I blew up, ran terrible times, usually did mean something — it meant I wasn’t in the shape I needed to be in, or that I needed more rest or recovery.
At the time, of course, that wasn’t always easy to see. I wished I could just snap out of it. I thought I was doing something wrong, or something was wrong with me, given that I couldn’t just snap out of that string of bad performances.
Beyond finding too much meaning, a lot of it was just over-personalizing accomplishments and failures. It was making one part of my life too much of my identity. Running a bad race meant I was a failure as a person. By contrast, running a really good race meant I won at life.
At running, at least, I am in a much better place than I used to be. Running is not as high of a priority in my life anymore, even if I am trying to break 2:30 in the marathon. If I don’t run well and have a bad race, there are plenty of other parts of my identity I can turn to to just shake it off. I can go on a date with my wife, hang out with friends, or write. Anything I could do to take a break and rest was what I needed more than I needed to work harder and dig in more. This came with over a decade of taking running way too seriously and having it be too core to my identity, so it took a lot of time to build that emotional maturity.
But I am struggling to have that same mindset applied to the bar exam.
For the bar exam, passing will mean I can move on with my life and put this behind me. Failing means I will be set back forever.
I know it is wrong. I know it is hard to have the stakes always feel so high. The only thing that helps is reminding myself of what exists outside that tunnel vision — a life, a family, friends, faith. I often forget it and need reminders. But because I have all those things, even if my worst fears came true, even though I will be devastated, everything will be okay.
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This post was previously published on The Partnered Pen.
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