Why Law School is Stressful

There are of course many reasons that law school is stressful: it's difficult; it's competitive; it's expensive. But what I find most stressful -- and most disheartening -- is the way it fuels ritual self-deprecation. Some days I am reminded of discussions that, as a woman, I learned to have in my teens where you go around the table and each woman castigates herself for having eaten a cupcake or failing to do crunches or daring to have hips. I used to speculate about the purpose of this public self-shaming: it seemed like a way of humanizing yourself, offering a piece of yourself to the group, aggressively baring your flaws.

But what happens in law school is, I think, a little different. The truth is that not since high school have I been part of a community that polices itself so zealously. In high school, the monitoring was social: confidants, crushes, companions. Now, it is academic. And it's not just about keeping other people in line but about making sure that you measure up. Thus, again and again I watch one person's sincere question provoke anxiety in someone else: "Why didn't I think of that? I must be hopelessly off-track."

In general, I think that homogenous communities are prone to this kind of searing pressure to conform. And law schools, like undergraduate campuses, are by nature homogenous, or at least homogenizing -- not because of the background of the students, not because of their interests or talents, but because of their goals, fears, and desires. It doesn't matter where you're from or what you read for fun or what challenges you have faced: at the end of the semester, we're all trying to pass the same final and that pressure can squeeze the individuality right out of you. That's why I think that the working world -- where you tend to find age diversity (one of the most important and often overlooked kinds of diversity) -- felt like such a relief to me after college (at least in some ways): in the topsy-turvy dimension outside school, people do all KINDS of crazy things, in any which order, and it's rare for everyone you know to be panicking at the same time, for the same reason.

It just makes me sad to see some of the very brightest people I know criticize themselves on a daily basis for doing something other than reading Examples & Explanations 12 hours a day. And this is my rant about it.