Moving On from the Exam

February 28, 2010

After two months of preparation, I completed the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Bar Exams on February 22, 23, and 24. On the night of the 23rd, I slept in a smoking room at a dingy hotel in Cinnaminson. I met with a friend who was also taking the NJ portion for dinner, studied for a few hours (we're not supposed to study at all by this point), and sat for six hours of handwritten essays with a break for lunch, taken at Dunkin' Donuts.

Grateful that the foot of snow they called for never materialized, I cruised home over the Betsy Ross Bridge and celebrated the end of my law school endeavor with a run at the gym, and half an hour in the sauna. Steve and I had champagne and too much food at our fave Italian restaurant, and I slept for twelve hours.

Over the next few days, I packed for the move to my new room at the Farmhouse, and tried to stop thinking about all the things I had learned for the Bar. It was - and still is - hard not to analyze things in a certain way after I had been training my brain to do so for such a long time. Specifically, I had learned to get and assess a body of facts and make split-second, timed multiple choice decisions in under 1.5 minutes per question. Even today, a week later, I feel a disproportionate pressure to make my choices in under 15 seconds. A strange example, and unfortunately particularly stressful, is whether or not to change lanes while driving. Of course, this is a decision that must happen regularly, and I hope the anxiety goes away over time, as it is exhausting.

Saturday night, fellow exam takers and I celebrated in Queen Village with delicious homemade pierogies and French delicacies, wine, and a silly hat contest. I won the hat contest! The real prize of the night was when Geoff's path and mine intersected somewhat randomly, reminding me how the universe teeters on a mere pinhead.

The next morning, I cleaned an inordinate and depressing amount of leftover dog hair from the floorboards of the room I am now renting. With the room smelling reassuringly of bleach and pinesol, my friends cluttered it with the contents of the rental truck half-full of my meager belongings. Without staying for even ten minutes to rearrange or arrange anything, we bolted out to return the truck and grab a beer and a bite. The thought of making the room habitable so diminished my spirit that, when Steve and I returned to make a plan of attack, I took one look at the room and begged him to help me shut the windows and leave it until I returned from California.

Sunday night, I felt like I should have been reading or studying something. I felt a nagging restlessness, laying on the couch in the dark, watching the US fight their hearts out against Canada in the gold-medal hockey game. When the lights came on, I realized that I felt distant from my own life (again). In six hours, I would be getting on a plane to fly to San Diego for one week. There, I had friends to stay with, would have a loaner car, and my only agenda was to relax. However, I only felt anxiety - the same kind of anxiety that enraptured me leading up to the Bar Exam.

On the plane, I slept. Upon arriving in San Diego, I felt a great burden lift from me, but the tugging of the anxiety remained palpable too.