{She Said} The Bar Brings a Heavy Toll

We are in the depths of bar prep now. Here is how it generally goes…

Matt vacillates between feelings of hopelessness and empowerment. I feel a great sense of duty to march through the hopelessness with him and then great relief when the empowerment takes hold.

We have been having some pretty intense pep talks. Matt is actually kind of scared of them because I am pretty forceful with sentiments such as the following…

“You ARE doing your best and that is all you can expect from yourself.”
“Dwelling on this discouragement is the ONLY thing you can do wrong here.”
“Get over it, this isn’t productive.”
“Stop focusing on what you haven’t done and start doing it.”

These and others are all said in a pretty demanding voice because I am honestly not great with being nurturing in my pep talks. I have to focus on logical sentiment because I don’t tend to be a great “warm fuzzy” person and when I try to be I feel like it comes off as a crock.

Yesterday, I actually reached a breaking point where I told Matt that having to be positive was starting to get to me. His moments of hopelessness really get me down because typically in those times I want to logically analyze whether or not it really is hopeless. In this circumstance, however, I don’t feel like there is any point in doing that. Matt has to go take that test in 6 days regardless of hopelessness so we might as well focus on the positive. Again, not my strong suit.

All that being said, we are making it through pretty well. Matt is being a trooper- I am really impressed with his diligence (and brilliance but don’t tell him that yet). He pretty much hates everything except me, Capri, and cookies right now but he is keeping that sunshine to himself for the most part. To sum it up, he hates studying, he hates reading, he hates writing, he hates the law, he hates noises, he hates the four walls of his office, he hates commercials, he hates halogen light, he hates my chipperness in the morning, and that is just the short list. But he is still his friendly funny self during breaks and I make sure to keep him stocked with snacks so he can endure everything else as well as possible.

That’s our story right now.