Testing Anxiety

A colleague of mine at work recently discovered that she passed the bar, which got me thinking about my own bar nightmare experience. Two of the longest days in my life. Like everyone else, I shelled out a thousand bucks for a two-month bar review class. I can think of few worst ways to spend a summer than sitting in a crowded auditorium every day to review the finer points of contract law or torts or half a dozen other subjects. And about three weeks before the bar, my friend Charles and I bought a computer game that we thought would be a good distraction from studying. Bad idea. We would be playing this game until 2 or 3 in the morning, time that could have been used for studying. When I walked into the exam, I was virtually certain I was going to fail. But somehow, we both passed. My accommodations for the exam were actually pretty sweet. I had this huge conference room in the Judicial Center all to myself and two personal scribes to record my answers. I would have enjoyed the setting a lot more if I had been a little less terrified. After the second day of the exam, I came home to my apartment and…honestly, I don’t remember the next couple of days. My brain sort of shut down for a while. You could have put me in front of a television showing nothing but static and I would have been happy.