The Ceiling I Built Myself
If you read the last post in this series, you know about a lawyer in Fort Lauderdale who told me (unsolicited) what my ceiling was. And I asked him how much money he made. Then I taped my University of Miami Law School acceptance letter over my desk.
That was one origin story. This is another one.
In that story, someone else had drawn the ceiling. In this one, I had drawn it myself.
This one is about what happens when the ceiling you have accepted for yourself turns out to be wrong.
Waiting for Certainty
By the winter of 1994, I had been working at that same Fort Lauderdale firm for about five or six months. I had graduated from Florida State University the previous spring and moved back home to South Florida with no particular plan for law school. I just had a general sense that I wanted to go, and a much more specific sense that I was not ready to apply.
That last part is worth sitting with for a moment. I wanted to be a lawyer. And I was not ready to apply to law school.
What I was actually doing was waiting to feel certain. Waiting until my personal statement was exactly right, until my application materials were as close to perfect as I could make them, until I felt like someone who deserved to send in an application. The materials sat on my desk for weeks, while I edited and reconsidered and convinced myself I was just being thorough.
The result of all that thoroughness was that I submitted everything very close to the deadline. When you score highly on the LSAT, a number of schools will waive their application fees and invite you to apply. That was my situation, so I was able to apply to roughly twenty schools for free. I paid the application fees for two.
One was Harvard Law School, mostly because my mother agreed to write the check, and I did not see the point in arguing about the $75 I was certain she was wasting.
The other was the University of Miami Law School, and I want to be specific about why, because it matters to the story. That day, in that partner’s office, UM was my dream school. I had come home to South Florida after years of disruption (transferring from Tufts, my grandmother’s death, my father’s stroke, moving to Tallahassee), and I had built a life I really liked in South Florida. My friends were there. My family was there. My comfort was there. UM Law was the school that let me keep all of that. It fit the life I had created, and that was not a small thing.
Borrowed Belief
I want to tell you about my mother for a minute.
She had not gone to law school. But she had looked at her daughter, and at a 93rd percentile LSAT score, and at Harvard Law School, and reached a conclusion I had not reached and could not reach on my own: that there was no obvious reason those things could not go together.
I did not share her confidence. I applied to Harvard to make her stop asking. That is the complete explanation. It did not occur to me that I would be admitted. Harvard Law School was not on my radar as a real possibility. It was a box I checked to end a conversation.
Sometimes the person with the more accurate assessment of what is possible for you is not you.
The Life I Had Already Chosen
Within a week of submitting my applications, I received a phone call from a professor at the University of Miami Law School. He asked if I could come in to interview for the President’s Scholarship.
I told him I had not been admitted yet.
He said, essentially, that the admission was a formality, the administrative process just needed time, and that a scholarship decision had to be made within the next few days. I was being invited to interview for a scholarship because they thought I was a strong candidate.
That Saturday, I drove down to Miami and sat with two professors from the law school. Either that day or within a few days after, I was told I had been awarded the President’s Scholarship along with an $11,000 annual stipend. I accepted. I wrote a check to hold my housing.
I was going to the University of Miami Law School. That was decided.
There was nothing to think about. I certainly was not thinking about Harvard. I had sent that application to satisfy my mother. I had not expected a positive response, and none had come. As far as I was concerned, the matter was closed.
The Possibility I Had Ruled Out
The box from Harvard Law School arrived on a Friday in May, the Friday before Mother’s Day.
It was a large box. A friend who happened to be with me pointed that out. “They would not send a big box like that to reject you,” she said.
She was right. I had been admitted to Harvard Law School.
I want to try to describe what it felt like to stand there holding that box. The acceptance was real and genuinely wonderful. It was also genuinely disorienting. I had already decided. I had a plan. I had written a check. I had a housing deposit on a life I was looking forward to.
And here was Harvard, to which I had applied as a gesture toward my mother, which I never actually believed would say yes, and which I had filed away and stopped thinking about entirely, saying yes.
My parents were beside themselves.
The decision, if there even was one, seemed obvious.
Walking In Without the Belief
I withdrew from the University of Miami. I thanked the professors who had interviewed me for their time and their generosity. When I made that call, I felt genuinely grateful for what they had offered. And genuinely uncertain about what I was choosing instead.
Because here is what I was choosing: a place where I was convinced I would be the least intelligent person in every room.
I had scored in the 93rd percentile on the LSAT, but I had already decided that was a fluke, a lucky test day. Surely the students at Harvard had scored higher. I had done well at Florida State. The people I was about to sit next to had done well at Ivy League establishments (and they were not afraid to let you know it, I would soon discover).
I was walking into a school where I believed I would be found out in short order.
(My sister had a different perspective. She told me, “even if they make you sweep up on the way out, you’ll do it with a Harvard Law degree.”)
So, I chose Harvard. I took out loans. I left South Florida again, my friends, my family, the warm climate, and showed up in Cambridge that August with every doubt intact.
My admission had not resolved the imposter feeling at all. It had just moved it to a new (colder) address.
I sat in those classrooms my first year of law school waiting to be found out.
Nobody found me out.
Nor was I holding a broom at graduation.
You Do Not Have to Believe Yet
I think about this story when I talk to women who are waiting to feel ready before they just do the thing.
The imposter feeling is not evidence that you do not belong somewhere. Sometimes it is simply what uncertainty feels like when the stakes matter. Sometimes it means you have entered a room your internal map did not yet include.
There is an SRA™ lesson in this, too.
Sometimes the unreliable map is not the one someone else hands you. Sometimes it is your own assessment of what you are ready for, what rooms you belong in, or what outcomes are realistic for someone like you.
The fact that the belief came from inside the house does not make it objective or true.
And here is what I want you to hold onto: I did not have the belief. My mother had the belief. I borrowed it long enough to send an application that I was convinced would go nowhere.
That is all it took.
You do not have to be certain. You do not have to feel ready. You do not even have to be the one who believes at first.
You just have to be willing to send the application.
And maybe, if you are lucky, let someone else pay the $75 while you figure out the rest.
Audacity Is Not Priced Equally
One last thing, because this blog has always tried to tell the full truth: going through a door that is hard to open does not mean the door opens at the same cost for everyone who tries.
Audacity is real, and it can be built.
It is also not priced the same for everyone who builds it.
I will have more to say about that in a few weeks. For now, I just want you to consider what you have been waiting to feel before you apply for the thing.
And whether the waiting is actually making the application better, or whether it is just keeping you from sending it.
Strategic Radical Acceptance™. This is not Resignation. This is Liberation. And it’s Strategy.
