The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I was going to post this tomorrow, but I'm apparently freaking out too many people with my previous posts so I'll get it up sooner.

Friday night the California bar results became available. Friday night I was also a complete mess. I'd withstood the afore described Onslaught of Criticism reasonably well at the time, but with Friday quickly following on the heels of it, compounded with a few depressing conversations with technical recruiters late in the week, I was in no state to deal with potentially finding out that I'd not passed. Again. Yeah, I thought I'd stood a chance of passing, but after not passing the last time I was not going to be glib about it.

I left work early Friday, early enough so that I would not have to be with other people when the 6 o'clock release of the results came around. I needed the moment to be private. In fact, I needed a lot of private time right then. It had been a surprisingly hard month, and I needed to pull myself together before risking the discovery of the result.

So I came home, ate dinner, watched a bunch of Stephen Fry clips on YouTube, and went to bed. This morning then I got up and wrote the nearly 4000 words of those previous posts that had been stewing in my head all week. That's what I needed to do to prepare. It is negative, I'll admit, but (particularly the final one), it also was my pep talk.

Still, I was in no rush to find out the result. I figured everyone would know by Sunday when the pass list became public, so I figured I'd enjoy the relative bliss of my ignorance for a while longer. However I'd told a number of people that the results would be out on Friday, and they started calling me with concerned interest to find out the result. "I haven't looked yet," I told them. "I'm not ready." "You'll let me know as soon as you find out," my grandma requested. "Yes," I said, before adding only semi-facetiously, "But you'll still love me if I fail, right?"

"I'll love you no matter what!" I think she was somewhat put out that I would even doubt it, but I was grateful to hear it said so specifically. I needed to know it was ok to fail before risking discovery that I had.

I still wasn't rushing, but by now it was about 2:30pm and the mail had come. I'd figured I might eat or take a bike ride before looking it up on the web, but I decided to check the mail first just to see if the letter had arrived. The letter, you see, is much better than the website, because even if you saw that you had passed on the website you couldn't really believe it until you got the letter anyway.

Ominously, the envelope looked a little fat. I'd gotten a fat envelope when I'd failed. "But that envelope was a different shape," I thought to myself. (I'm not sure that's true, I'd have to go find it, but that's what I thought when I brought the mail in.) Unwilling to wait any longer, however, I tore it open.

At first I thought I'd failed. These letters are dense and cryptic, and nervous eyeballs tend to skip over the important words. Words like, "delighted," "achieved," "passing," and "congratulations." Words that were, in fact, in my letter.

I can still barely get my head around this. I can't even begin to comprehend the amount of relief I feel. I started thinking about it, then got sidetracked by calling people, most of whom who immediately wanted to engage in "what next?" conversations.

I'm not ready to have those yet. I'm still smarting a bit from earlier days, and I really just want to savor this. But I do know that I am suddenly much better off by this evening than I thought I was earlier in the day. And suddenly I'm so much more aware of my own strength and feel like everything just might be possible after all.