near breakdown

In all of my years of school, I have never had nightmares about failing tests. (I always had nightmares about showing up to the wrong school -- which is understandable considering the sheer number of schools I attended as a child -- but never about tests). Well, last night, I had a horrible nightmare about the bar. It was my first and hopefully my last.

The dream started off with me getting off of an airplane with Luis and I was really scared because we had to walk across this little walkway at the gate (and I'm deathly afraid of heights). Luis assured me that everything would be fine because there were walls on both sides of the walkway and I wouldn't be able to see how high we were. So we made it across without any problems. But then in the next moment, I was being driven to the airport again by Luis' best friend's mom. Apparently I was going to be flying somewhere with Luis' best friend. Unfortunately, this time there were no walls shielding my view and we had to get across this small, narrow walkway in order to get into the airport. I remember being scared to death and that I could picture myself getting on my hands and knees to be able to hold onto the walkway unable to move and farther.

With all of the stress and anxiety of the walkway out of the picture, I found myself in a big room taking the bar exam. We were all told to begin our exams. I looked down at my paper and saw nothing there. I tried reading the directions, but I just couldn't understand them. So I kept reading them over and over again hoping that something was going to make sense, but it didn't. As I glanced around, I noticed everyone else in the room writing furiously, and I thought, "That's it, I'm never going to become a lawyer." The test administrator then told us that we would have a 30 minute recess. I walked up to him and asked if the recess was a requirement or if we could continue to work on our tests. He said that it was up to us, but that most people preferred to take a break. I went right back to my desk and continued staring at the blank piece of paper unable to write anything.

At this point I woke up more stressed than I've ever been in my life. I then looked around and saw that the entire apartment was a mess. We hadn't done the dishes the day before. There were clothes in our room that needed to be washed or put away. And we still needed to clean out our little laundry area so that we could bring in the washer/dryer that Luis' best friend's parents were letting us have. And then icing on the cake: our toilet started making a sound like someone was jack hammering the pipes. At this point, I felt like I was going to lose it. I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die... I didn't. I'm still here. And, at this point (after de-stressing for a little while), am surprisingly feeling pretty good about taking this test next week.