Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
"Pinch me," I told my husband over celebratory dinner at Benihana last night. "Sooner or later I'm going to have to wake up."
It is obstinately refusing to sink in, this -- this -- success of mine. I've been resigned for so long to the fact that I probably blew it that I simply can't convince myself that I didn't blow it after all. But no matter how many times I blink at the transcript, it's still there, looking just as I had hoped and dreamed and prayed it would. My incurable Torts grade from last semester, cause of so much angst and lost sleep, now sticks out like ragweed on a neatly manicured lawn. Hopefully I can spin it as an icebreaker, a conversation piece.
I should say this: Nice numbers are nice, but only part of the real victory here. First of all, these grades mean that I can now proceed more or less unhobbled on my major project of this summer (details to follow at some point), something that has been very important to me since before I began this blog. But secondly, and even more importantly, these grades dispel almost all of the wholly destructive depression and self-doubt that resulted from my miserable first semester. I had no idea who this person was, getting on this train and going to this law school and getting these grades. I knew myself, and it wasn't me.
For this reason in large part, I'm almost wishing that I'd adopted a pseudonym to sign my blog posts instead of just a string of initials. It would have been easier to look down from the narrator's foretop into the life of some semi-fictional character as she went about the business of 1L than to go through the whole mess myself. Ah well. Live and learn. My next blog, or at least the next blog I keep during a negativity-ridden time in my life, will be fully anonymous.
But I, now, finally, am regaining confidence in my own character, the nonfiction flesh-and-blood one. I'm still here, it seems. I did not completely shatter, back a few months when it sure as hell felt like I did. I'm not sure who was in my skin for most of this year, but right now, I'm pretty sure that it's me again. I'm glad. I missed her.
Epigraph:
Before my first year of law school began, I had nine Xanax in a bottle in my medicine cabinet.
My first year of law school has now ended, and I still have the same nine Xanax in the same bottle in my medicine cabinet.
Inclinata resurgit.