N.S.H.

I’ve got more anxiety than ever before. Two weeks and two days left and if the palpitation keeps up like this I don’t know if I’ll make it to the test alive. Five hours at Powell and I hit that wall where I can’t stare at any more problems and my mind is burnt out and I’m just so exhausted but I still can’t fall asleep. I can’t nap. It’s knowing I’m capable of getting the score I want, but scared shitless that it will be a bad day, or a bad set of logic games, or a few slips in focus that will leave the right answer unattended. It’s feeling like the prize is right in front of you but there’s this thick glass wall that is keeping you from grabbing it.

Relax. One day at a time, even if I’m down to the last 14.  Breathe big and deep and get your heart to stop doing this thing. Fucking. Stop.

I’m so old. I remember being really young and thinking about how far away it’d be when baby cousin Dani would start high school, and I would be a high school senior. She just had her own senior prom and I’m edging closer and closer to finishing college. I’m old, like go up to the bar and get a drink without anyone giving me shit old. Like wear adult people dresses and eyeshadow old. Like talk to people even older than me and keep conversation, real conversation, not weather and “this what I’m doing/I’m these peoples’ daughter”, old. Old enough to know I can’t leave without saying bye to enough people without it feeling rude anymore, knowing there are certain conversations I should and shouldn’t stick around for too long. Old enough to realize that more and more of what could be considered my demographic, or maybe just that above mine, isn’t doing the whole student thing anymore. They’re real world employed old and I will be too. Old enough to see my older cousins and realize some of them are not even young professional old anymore, they’re just middle age old. I guess I’m still trying to classify this incessant progression of “old”. I love that I’ve grown up surrounded by physical manifestations of passing time, seeing it in myself only through the lens of my family. I was born into this giant net of role models, a super extensive web of aunts and cousins and cousins kids. It gives you thoughts and resolves and convictions and this effervescent hope and excitement for all the different ways I will feel old. Thankful for the people I’ll have growing old alongside me.

My debit card statement is riddled with 3 dollar charges from Yogurtland. The new flavor of the month/season/year/whatever is called mocha almond crunch. It’s an unimaginably delicious cross section of dark chocolate and mocha and when you add cookie dough bites and rainbow sprinkles, it gives Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked a bonafide run for it’s money.

It’s May, and like it always goes, the sun starts to tease Westwood. Catalyzing false hopes of summer that only vanquish when the sun goes down around 7. Those of us who’ve chosen to drive around with moon-roofs or windows open in shorts and sundresses are left outside sans-jacket, with bare limbs covered in goosebumps. May in LA is when I notice the difference between here and Anaheim Hills the most. When springtime used to hit us in Orange County, it was a different kind of real. We changed into our shorts and it was for good, for all day, for boba or In n Out at 10pm with a backup cardigan that inevitably stayed locked in the trunk. My iPhone only makes that discrepancy more apparent, reminding me of the often polar climates—64 in the afternoon here, 82 there. Not that the highs are very different, but it’s the lows that remind me how very far I am from home.

And then you come back to an empty apartment to stifle the goosebumps on your stiffened legs with sweatpants and nap for just a little bit before the last night of the weekend turns into that necessarily productive Sunday. But you just can’t fall asleep. Because it’s day in and day out with diagnostics and what used to be a blessing in the limitless faith your family holds in you becomes a curse. Because they’re not worried, because I’ve always pulled through, because they have never thought I’ll somehow fall behind any legacy left before me in this family. But I don’t know how many numbers to throw in their faces, how to describe to them the mistakes I continue to make, how urgently I need them to understand that I am NOT in good shape. I fully admit I project my own anxieties as faults of those who just have a sugarcoated approach to showing that they care. But I feel like I need someone to stand on the edge with me and look down, someone who can understand how many miles I risk falling.

It’s a double edged sword of being the youngest. In ways that I will always admire and appreciate, my brothers have progressed through their educations and continued onto professional lives in significant and reputable ways. My parents “did something right” by raising a family of current/future doctors and lawyers, but there’s an inherent resentment that festers when people make comments like that at parties, even in jest. I never felt pressured to choose law, I just knew at an early age that it was a career with which I would do well, and moreover, I would be happy. Granted, I was young and naive and only knew a glamourized fraction of what goes into the average day of an attorney. But I’m here 10 years later, working at a law firm where half the people in the office hate their day and pull out clumps of hair by the hour, seeing more and more news articles about how minimally lucrative the legal sector has become, and utterly frustrated with the process of applying to law school. And I know this is just the beginning. But I am no less committed to the future I chose as a kid; nothing has changed about what then made me feel competent, except for the fact that I now realize how much more is involved. Point being, this was never about my parents or my family. Make no mistake—if I told my Dad tomorrow that I’m giving up on law school to paint murals on street benches in Escondido, he would be in no rush to buy a cake. But he would, eventually, get used to it—if I swore to him I’d be the best at it. If I loved every minute of what I did and made myself and other people proud of my work. Because that’s the way his own career holds true in his heart and it is ultimately the only commitment he has pressured onto his children. So one real life lawyer spawn and a medical student later, my parents are waiting on me to finish what my brothers started. They’re not worried because they’ve never had to be. I have met the expectations that my brothers left behind for me to fulfill, surpassing them in many ways that are specific to who I am. Not out of fear of failure, just a subconscious refusal to acknowledge it. Witnessing the accomplishments of my brothers as I’ve grown older has never intimidated me; I still go to sleep at night and pray for their continued luck and success before that of anyone else. But it has also mentally eclipsed any alternative to success in my own vision of the future. And in that respect, I am now often scared. Because luck can only strike a family so many times and I don’t know when and if or what kind of learning curve will strike with the LSAT. I hate knowing I will be reduced to a number. And I would hate to think there’s a snag in the elaborately quilted fabric that has been constructed through years and years of hopes, dreams, prayers, and efforts.

So I’m taking a diagnostic everyday. And I’m inconsistent and so unstable and left with just over three weeks. I keep drinking coffee and I keep running because it’s something tangible onto which I feel like I can attach my efforts. But on Saturdays, I like to wear shorts and walk to Yogurtland. Because it is a fragment of time that reminds me there is an infinite past and future, during which there will be sunshine and I will always be able to try a different flavor of yogurt.