The Blogging for Books contest at The Zero Boss blog invites us to celebrate the back-to-school season by writing about some point in our lives when we:
- learned a harsh life lesson, got punk’d, or simply had someone make an ass of us;
- gained a spectacular new insight into life; or
- decided to educate ourselves about something.
Okay, I'll bite.
I'm choosing number 2, because it was such a wonderful, empowering insight.
The year was 1984. I was in my 20s (okay, late 20s). I'd never left my hometown of Atlanta. My lifetime dream had been to write for the Atlanta Constitution, and I'd gotten there three years earlier. By this point, I was discovering that maybe my lifetime dream had been too small. I was restless and bored, so I applied for a one-year fellowship for legal affairs reporters at Yale Law School--and, much to my delight and terror, got in.
It was severe culture shock. New Haven, outside the rarefied confines of Yale, is a gritty, Northeastern city, not particularly lovely; the people were not particularly friendly, at least not in the Southern way I was used to; there was more snow in one week than I'd seen in my whole life; I kept falling down on my butt trying to walk on the ice; and the law school itself was a scorpion's nest of rivalries and snobbery--much of which was too subtle for me to even recognize at first. (There is no dumbness dumber than being snubbed and not realizing it.) It probably wouldn't have been such a noticeable problem for me had it not been for the fact that Yale was undergoing one of its periodic labor convulsions: the Clerical and Technical Workers' Union was on strike, which severely disrupted life at the law school and, among other things, shut down the Commons, where normally you'd eat and meet people. The strike lasted for months.
By the middle of the year, things had pretty much reached their nadir. I can be slow, but not that slow, and I was picking up on the fact that there were people at Yale who were the products of elite private schools and who thought they were several hundred IQ points smarter than me, a mere journalist who had squeaked in through the back door, the product of a very mediocre Georgia public school system. And I was beginning to think they were right. I was, in short, thoroughly cowed.
At this point my constitutional law class was given an assignment to argue a case involving a free speech issue in front of a moot court. I was assigned to "represent" the school board in this case, which involved a student who was penalized for praying in the cafeteria during lunch hour. My sympathies were with the student, but what the hell: I started preparing my case. And then I came down with a severe--no, let's say crushing--case of stage fright. I have no business being here, I thought. I can't do this. I'm going to sound like an idiot. All these other people in my class are going to talk rings around me. Please, please, please, just don't let anybody laugh out loud.
I remember buying a new blouse to boost my confidence. It didn't work. I remember sitting on the back steps of my apartment the day of the moot court, in tears, thinking about how humiliating this experience was going to be. Oh, well: some things have to be done. When the dread moment came, I rose and stood before the panel of judges (i.e. professors) and started my speech. Right away (this was designed to operate like an appellate court, where the judges and the lawyers engage in a free exchange of questions and answers) I was interrupted by a question, and something in my head went ding! and I gave them an answer. It was not in my notes. But it was a good answer. And from that moment on, my fear left me and I knew that I knew what I was doing.
Not only did I not embarrass myself that night, I earned special praise from the profs. But that wasn't worth as much to me as what I'd taught myself: that fear can be crippling, that other peoples' opinions of your worth don't necessarily have anything to do with reality, and that though, yes, there were people at Yale much smarter than I, they were heavily outnumbered by the people who just thought they were smarter--by virtue of wealth or social connections or family legacy or just an innate sense of personal superiority. In a way, they were just as much prisoners of their own self-image as I was, just in a flip-side kind of way.
That evening was like breaking out of a plastic bag--one in which I'd learned to breathe, but which had not really given me enough air and space to do the things I was capable of doing. I will always be grateful for being put on the spot, being forced to face my own self-loathing, and to have gotten through it. Did it end my propensity for self-doubt? Nah. But it's made subsequent battles so much easier. And today, 22 years later, I can tell my daughters with the ironclad conviction born of experience that they are capable of ever so much more than they may dream of.