Read on Twitter
I know we’re all supposed to be all rAtIoNaL and pRoFfEsSiOnAl about the dire threat to our literal lives and livelihoods that bar examiners are imposing on us, but I want to share some personal info about where I’m at and how this disaster with the bar exam affects me
I’m not looking for sympathy, I know I have it in like the 40th percentile of how bad this can get and I don’t have a condition where COVID poses any extra risk of death. But I think it’s important to sort of humanize the impact of all this dithering and these wrong decisions.
My family is poor. My mom is 62, disabled, and works at a grocery store because she lost almost everything in 2008. In 2011, a botched surgery cost her most of the use of her right leg. I cared for her for six years while she learned a new way to walk and got stronger.
I don’t resent it, but it made it hard to find work after I got my BA in 2012 because I needed fewer, flexible hours. I tried fruitlessly to be self employed. I had a part time office admin job for a while that paid enough for some expenses but not all, let alone savings.
What my mom didn’t lose in the crash she slowly spent keeping us afloat. I lived on nothing but debt for the last three years just trying to make it over the hill to a job that could support us. And I had almost made it too, when the virus hit.
We really scrambled to fund my basic security even for the regular bar period and now that it’s extended, it’s really messed things up for us because after all these years and incidents, we have nothing left to tap into. The next thing to tap into was supposed to be my earnings.
When my mom lost the use of her leg, I was 22 years old. Today I am 31. I am behind in life from taking hit after hit like this from circumstances I can’t control. Now I have to take another one at the exact moment I was trying to leap from one crumbling ledge to the next cliff.
It hit me last night that I only have a place to stay until Sept 12. If I had a license, I could use this short time to find work. It takes time to save a little for moving and get employment verification for a real lease. I just want to be in a position to have a place to live.
Instead I will be bludgeoning my brain all day every day for an exam that will probably end up cancelled. Even late cancelling will stop the superspreading event tg, but every day they dither until the eleventh hour is another day gone by for my housing, wasted for my job search.
Four months ago I had the same mundane expectation as anyone else to struggle financially and emotionally through this exam because that’s how it is. Today, as COVID continues to skyrocket, I am more appalled and outraged with every passing day that these exams are not cancelled.
