Don’t panic.
I had a panic attack during a Christmas exam in my first of year law school.
The exam was for contracts. The way law school exams work is that they’re fairly open ended. You get a fact pattern, a story, and it’s up to you to figure out how to solve it.
So?I remember getting the exam, and reading it all the way through…and then…I sort of blacked out. I could not think. I went to the washroom to try and calm down. I forced myself to begin writing…something…anything. Then, because what I’d written was terrible, I crossed all of it out. And then I pushed forward again and wrote another thing. I crossed that out too.
After this, I looked up at the clock. By then I was 30 minutes into a 1 hour exam, and I’d written nothing. So I put my pen down.
In the end I handed in an effectively blank exam. My contracts grade, as of Christmas 2009, was 10%.
It doesn’t end there. Luckily for me, the Christmas exams were effectively practice exams. They were the dress rehearsal for end of year, when you did the one exam which gave you your entire grade for the year. Christmas exams still counted, in theory, but only if I did better on it than I did on the final. (For me, literally none of my Christmas exams counted.)
Right, so then I had a panic attack during a year end exam.
It was constitutional law. My first final exam, and maybe…my only final exam? That flashed through my mind as I stared at it, getting up to go to the washroom, looking at my pale face in the mirror, sitting down again, continuing to panic.
There was a turning point. I was half an hour in to a three hour exam. I gave up, in a sense.
I said to myself: I can stop here, and get kicked out of law school, or I can just try it. I won’t do well, I won’t get a good job, but at least I can stay in law school. I can just keep going.
And that calmed me down.
I finished the exam. The panic didn’t happen again that year, or during any other exam since. And, at the risk of tedious immodesty, I didn’t do badly.
I’ve thought about why I panicked during those exams.
The answer, I think, was what I was looking at. I wanted to succeed. As if I could really know what that would mean to me over the course of my life. I wanted a job. A certain type of job. Grades were the way to get that job. So I needed good grades. And that made me panic.
I was looking at the void on the other side of the exam. My first impulse, nearly always, in circumstances like these (school, or a job interview, or a high pressure work situation), is to rush to fill that empty space. But of course, I can’t. The future is Unknown, capital U, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
So, for me at least, in frightening moments, there’s something to be said for putting my head down. Just doing the next thing, and receiving what comes, whatever that might be.
My message to future Jon (and a Coldplay song title, but we’ll overlook that):
Don’t panic.