Lessons from ALMOST going to Law School (II)

Part II

Remember when I said I trusted God but I wanted him to tell me the “how” because I was afraid of falling? Well the next semester I enrolled in an LSAT prep course and I fell HARD. I wish I could say it was a cute little stumble where you don't quite hit the ground and you can play it off like nothing happened, but unfortunately, it was not that sort of fall. It was a painful fall. The kind of fall that inevitably turns into a meme. It was the sort of fall that knocks the wind out of you and forces you to lay there, not crying, not laughing, but just stunned and seeing stars. The kind that makes everyone who witnesses it wince because they can almost feel the pain. I felt like everything that I feared, the very problems that led me to pray and fast so much in the first place had sent me crashing down into a tailspin. I understood everything wasn’t always going to be perfect but the fact that things were this bad felt like a betrayal. It felt like God was laughing at me. 

I was ridiculously stressed and overwhelmed from juggling classes (including the physics class from hell) with organizations and doing 18-25 hours of LSAT prep per week while still working a part time job (which I had to quit eventually). My social life became non-existent but one thing about me (that can be good or bad) is that when I make up my mind about something I get tunnel vision and laser focus. I definitely wasn’t afraid of a little hard work because in my experience, my hard work had paid off every single time. My days started at 7:30 am and ended at around 12:30 pm on the days that I had LSAT prep,  I lived on snacks because I went from 5 hours of class straight to my prep course. When I didn’t have class I was catching up on homework or in one meeting or another. I was no stranger to hard work but I had never gone quite that hard. At some level I knew it wasn’t healthy to be doing as much as I was but, finally deciding to pursue law made me want it even more. I think all the effort would have been worth it to me if I’d seen my LSAT scores improve significantly but every time I took  another practice test, all I saw was failure, the biggest fear of them all, staring back at me, mocking me for trusting a God that would let me down so completely. 

I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. At one point I honestly just thought that God was setting me up for the testimony to be even greater. If I went from a 155 to a 173 on the day of the test then I’d really be able to testify of God’s glory and tell everyone that he did it and not me. I couldn’t get over the fact that I’d prayed months ago for God to stop me before I even started this journey if this wasn’t the right path for me. I knew God was good and he loved me. I knew it deeply and completely, like I knew the sky was blue and my skin was black.So, I had hope that things would work out but to say I wasn’t discouraged would be a lie. I couldn’t see the “how” so I had to trust in the “who”. In that season faith moved from a noun to a verb. I thought I had faith before but what I really had was the idea of faith. To literally be experiencing a reality that was contrary to what I believed and go on believing anyways, that was a different level of faith. It was the faith of taking a step without any assurance that the ground would be there to catch you in the next second. It was the faith of finding no solid ground under you and free falling in the hopes that someone much bigger and more powerful is waiting down below with open arms. 

It wasn’t a faith that I felt I’d chosen because honestly if I had a choice I would have selected a less painful path. It was a faith that was chosen for me by a God who could see my needs when I was too distracted by my wants. The hope in Romans 8: 28 was the only thing that kept me going. It was the only thing that gave me the freedom to keep working hard while giving God the anxiety and fear that threatened to incapacitate me. “For I know that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.” Shoot I loved God, I was called! It had to work together for good, because the alternative, the idea that I was shooting darts in the dark was too incomprehensible. There were times when I would cry at night just whispering “all things, all things, all things”. 

Before this period faith had always felt good, it had felt safe and secure to trust in the God of the universe. But when faith became real for me, it felt like life with all the good, bad and ugly mixed in. Faith felt like active hope. It wasn't the idea that things would work out the way I planned or the way I wanted because I could clearly see that that wasn’t happening. It was simply hope in the fact that however it worked out, since God is God, it would be for my good. Faith didn’t make getting through this time easy, it simply made it possible. I managed to drag myself through the semester but I finally had a breakdown on May 22nd, 2019. I know this because I have a journal entry from that day. It just all got to be too much. I cried a lot over the LSAT that semester but on May 22nd, the tears seemed to be unending. It was the kind of crying that led to sobbing, which led to massive headache and swollen face. I knew it was bad because I called my parents in the middle of my tears and didn’t even pause to say hello. I just kept right on crying. I was truly at my breaking point because I had tried so hard to be positive and just keep working hard but I was simply stuck.

 I was literally irritating myself with how hard I was trying not to focus on my score but, at that point I had been working 18-25 hours a week just on test prep for almost 3 months and my score had gone up like 5 points MAX! I honestly felt silly that it bothered me so much. I mean there were people with bigger issues in the world but after talking to my parents that day I realized that it was so much more than the test. I had unknowingly attached so many other things to my success on this test.  I think this time of preparing for my LSAT was different because it wasn’t just the test on the line, it was my future. My preparation for this test was bringing up all sorts of questions that took up the space in my mind between who saw myself as and who I really was. I’d put my confidence in what I thought I was capable of, other people’s belief in me, the direction of my future, and the idea of being able to do anything that I set my mind to all on this one test. These were things that defined me in some ways. 

More than just questioning my performance, I began to question myself. Attached to this test was all the faith, prayers, and tears that I had put into it. It was all of the stress, peace, time and fun that I sacrificed for it. It was the fact that I’d given my best to this thing and my best wasn’t good enough. That was what the LSAT had become, what I’d allowed it to become. I prayed the hardest prayers over this test but when everything was said and done for some reason I didn't feel like God had let me down, I felt like I had let myself down. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that not doing well on this test might be God’s way of redirecting me. However, it was so much harder to admit that I could not do well on it than to decide that I didn’t want to do it. It was failure. I wanted something that I worked hard for and didn’t get. I failed. Although I was living by faith, at times I still felt like I was drowning in that fear of failure. This was no longer perceived failure; it was real and even worse than I had imagined. Not the “you live and learn, bounce back, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” kind of failure. This was the “irreversible undeniable, living with the consequences forever, never quite the same” type of failure. 

Post breakdown, after my dad had given me words of encouragement and my mom prayed for me I had a moment of clarity when I realized that the frustration of my experience was designed by God for my growth. I just wished the growing pains did make me doubt everything I thought I knew about myself. I’d always been the “smart” one but God humbled me real quick. God never said it would be easy. He just said that he’d be there every step of the way. After all “many are the afflictions of the righteous but the Lord delivers us out of them all.” The words of my dad really stuck with me. He said failure is never fatal unless you make it so. Neither the LSAT or law school or any other external thing that I get or don't get can make me less Siji unless I give it permission to. My identity was not in my accomplishments. I had to trust that if I went through it, God could use it. A few weeks before my LSAT, I finally decided to let go. I’d been holding so tightly to the idea of having a plan that there was no room to explore other possibilities. So I finally sat down and looked up other career paths based on my interests and passions. It sounds crazy but I’d never done this before. Everything had always led back to law for me. 

Because I’d held on to the idea, not just that I wanted to be a lawyer, but that I WOULD be a lawyer for so long, it had grown with me. It had been as ever present as the sky, molding and shaping my thoughts about myself and my place in this world. Like a relic from childhood, the picture of myself as a lawyer was something that I’d held close and looked to for comfort. It felt like a piece of myself that I couldn't remember how to live without. That day in the middle of June, as painful as it was, I finally allowed myself to imagine other realities. But more importantly I finally allowed myself to be okay with not knowing. For a control freak like me, “I don't know” is like nails on a chalkboard but as I browsed the internet and saw endless possibilities of what my future could hold, I finally allowed myself to be okay with not knowing and I was free. The thing is, the whole time I thought I had control over my outcome, nothing was going as I expected so, I never really had the control of anything in the first place. It was in that moment that I was finally able to admit that I didn’t know what would happen. I forced myself to sit in the ambiguity and be okay with it. I forced myself to stop desperately asking “how?” and simply trust that my father, the God of the universe would take care of me. I was still shaky and uncertain but I finally had peace.