ARTS & CULTURE
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 7
Finding Yourself
The search to rediscover my sense of self
marie park › arts & culture editor
A
s my first submission to my beloved Obiter
Dicta as your Arts & Culture Editor, I wish to
impart my own heartfelt words of advice to
all of you now entering Osgoode, as well
as to my 2l and 3l friends who have struggled, as I
have, in finding their own little happy nook in this
profession. I hope that this year will be an important
one, made memorable by both the good times and the
rough days, and that in the end, we all find victory in
our collective quests to become the person we sought
to become as we started this journey in the first place.
The best advice comes from lived experiences, and
is given openly and honestly. Sometimes the truth is
brutal, but being told that reality is tough can prepare
you to embrace the challenges ahead. I hope that you
read this story, imbued with my own long struggle of
turning my self-hate into self-love, as a helpful guide
to finding your way through law school and beyond.
My story is not unique, and so I also hope that you
find strength in the fact that these feelings and experiences are a commonly shared hardship that is internalized in too many instances for too many of us.
To begin, I can easily say that my summer journey
began with an unhealthy level of anxiety.
Second year was done, but I had no job for the
summer. Dozens upon dozens of applications has
been sent, only to receive automated letters to the
effect of “we thank you for your application but sorry
we don’t want you” in my inbox. All the while, I saw
many of my classmates celebrate
their successes as
they found positions of their picking. The obligatory
phase of dejection set in as my abysmal transcript was
released after the exam period.
I believed it when I had been told that “first year is
the hardest” and that “2l and 3l are a breeze” - but
this advice, I learned, should be followed with important disclaimers about its oversimplification. Second
year was not much easier, but rather, it came with its
own set of specific struggles.
Through the humbling experiences of law school,
I easily found that I was not as invincible as I had
previously thought. With my self-confidence shattered and feeling ashamed of not meeting my initial
expectations, I went down a path of quiet self-loathing and persistent doubt. Things got really bad. As
the summer progressed, I knew that this had to stop.
The disappointment and dejection were affecting the
way I valued life, and in turn, how I behaved around
my family and friends. I just wanted to disappear and
become one with the wallpaper. As long as no attention was directed at me, my seemingly blatant failures and could-have-beens were equally invisible.
In June, I made the conscious commitment to
change all this. I found that the first lesson was to
learn to know yourself. Law school is surely a momentous ach