Bad writer

This first sentence of this blog post is the eighth first sentence I have attempted to write. Up until this point, the most I have gotten through for this blog post is about two paragraphs. It wasn't really because I didn't know what to write. I could talk about the law school experience for hours. I couldn't stick to writing something because everything I kept writing I felt was just bad. 

My writing skills are just one of the many things that have made me feel like an imposter here at King Hall. It is something that has been a sore subject for me. I get too embarrassed to show my writings to someone who could actually help me improve, so I just get stuck in a never-ending cycle of producing poor-quality writings especially for someone who is as "educated" as I am. 

When I was working on my applications to law schools, I had one of my old supervisors take a look at my personal statement. In a previous role, he was the Admissions Director for a graduate school. He asked me to go over his notes of my personal statement in person with him, which was something that I dreaded and tried to come up with a valid excuse to avoid. I couldn't think of anything, so I had to meet with him. When we met, he handed me a copy of my personal statement and there were marks everywhere. There wasn't a sentence on that page and a half that was safe from his pen. I don't remember much from that conversation beyond that he was incredibly helpful and that there was no judgment behind his words. However, I remember feeling embarrassed and disheartened. I felt like maybe I did not belong at a law school because I couldn't even properly write an essay about myself.

Fast forward a couple months, I was impulsively about to submit my law school applications. I remember that it was the week before Thanksgiving, which is significant because it is a couple weeks later than when I was originally planning on submitting the applications. At this point, I just wanted to be done with the application, personal statements, and LSATs preparation. So, at some point in the middle of the night, I just pulled the trigger and submitted everything. 

I do not know what came over me, but the next day during a slow period at work, I decided to go through my application. I'm not really sure why I thought that was a good idea in that moment to review work that I would not really be able to change. I found that my personal statement was littered with tiny errors and typos. I panicked. I spent the next 30 minutes googling what I could do. After that, I called and emailed every school I applied to ask if I could send in an "updated" personal statement. Luckily I was able to send in a new statement with few to no mistakes, hopefully. (I thought it would be best practice not to look at it again after I submitted the statement for the second time). 

As I started law school, I let these little things that many others would not think about, especially years later, define who I am as a law student. Immediately, I gave up on the notion of being anywhere near the top of my class and just assumed that everyone I spoke to was smarter than me. I went to class with that chip on my shoulder. I hated speaking in class because I was sure that everyone else had the same thoughts or that what I would contribute was incredibly incorrect.

Kirsten Weir wrote an article for the American Psychologist Association called Feel Like a Fraud. This article specifically discusses graduate students who are unable "to internalize and accept their success... and attribute their accomplishments to luck rather than ability." To this day, struggle to understand how I made it through so many years of education and to law school being such a terrible writer. Oftentimes, I think there is luck involved because how could I have achieved in an academic setting where writing is such a critical aspect.

However, I think I still have made great strides toward shedding this feeling of imposter. Last week, I was cold-called in class and as I was answering my professor's questions, I could see someone from the corner of my eye shaking her head I was saying an incorrect answer. I think that if this was back in my 1L year, I would not have spoken again for at least a couple semesters. Today, I was able to shrug it off, ignore someone who has an enormous ego, and not let someone I do not know affect me.