Bar Results Anxiety

I woke up Thursday with a screaming headache.  It literally hurt to even breathe.  This is pretty out of the ordinary for me, although it happens occasionally when I get stressed out or worried.  Most of the time, the headache is the result of me grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw in the middle of the night.  After I popped some Advil, drank some water and laid back down until the meds kicked in, I thought about what might be causing the headache. 

It did not take long to realize what caused my headache … it was May 5, 2011, the day that the February 2011 Colorado Bar Exam results came out.  Ugh!  Waiting for bar results is absolutely miserable. 

Some days you are positive you passed, no doubt.  You put in the time and the effort.  You did all the Barbri essays and hundred of MBE questions.  You made note cards and outlines and studied, studied, studied. 

Other days though, the doubt creeps up.  Maybe you did not do the right essays or focus on the right subjects.  Maybe your writing is just not up to par.  Maybe you should have just reviewed a few more MBE.  Oh and you probably should not have taken that weekend off to go to Lake Tahoe, even though you needed the break and it was a blast! 

Then there are the horrible days (thank god they are generally few and far between).  These days you are convinced that you failed.  Your essays were terrible and unfinished.  You could not answer the first 2 MBE questions without guessing so there goes that!  And performance tests were probably not even coherent.  Yeah, you definitely failed.

But the worst day of them all is the day you get the results.  The time passes in the weirdest way.  It creeps by, each agonizing minute going on and on but at the same time it is flying and before you know it, the time to check has come.  No matter what you do you cannot get the results off your mind.  The only thing that could make the day worse would be not passing.

On Wednesday night I had gone to bed.  Consciously I was relatively calm, subconsciously I obviously was not.  It is weird what your subconscious works on when you do not even know it.  So while I slept, my subconscious worried.  It worried so much that I began the teeth grinding and jaw clenching.  The result was my headache. 

Thankfully, the Advil finally kicked in and I was able to get up.  I had breakfast and got ready to go to the gym for my training session, all the while thinking about whether or not my name would appear on that list. 

This time around the list was available at 10am, which is so much more bearable than 6pm (which California makes you wait for).  Unfortunately, I have at standing training appointment at 10am on Thursdays.  So, I would not be able to check my results right away.  This definitely made me anxious.  I caught myself looking at the clock during my session and just counting the minutes until it was over (this NEVER happens!) 

Fortunately, I have a blackberry so I knew I could check the results when my session was over and before I started my cardio.  I grabbed my phone and saw I had a text and a voice message, both from a very good friend who knew the results were coming out.  He apparently had checked the list and found my name!  I could not help but check myself though.  I pulled up the list on my phone and there was my name in beautiful capital letters.  I passed the Colorado Bar Exam! :)

Subconsciously (and consciously) dealing with stress, anxiety, and worry takes gumption!