I can’t remember the last time I was so angry with myself.

I just turned in an unacceptable joke of a submission for my school’s write-on. My note was 2/3 of the word count. I ran out of time before I could proof read it. My editing portion was extremely half assed; I did barely any reference checking whatsoever. I have been comparing the number of write-on participants by year to the total number of names on all the journal’s mastheads trying to see if it’s possible that everyone who submits something gets an invitation to at least one of them. It’s not looking good.

I procrastinated more than I’ve procrastinated for any assignment since high school. We had about a week and I did it over (generously) two days. I was so burned out after finals and couldn’t bring myself to do more work after getting home from my summer job. I just didn’t have it in me. All I had the energy to do was crawl into my bed and play Zelda (TERRIBLE timing on the release of that, btw).

I like writing, but I hate bluebooking and I felt so beaten down by every 2L I know telling me that day-to-day journal work was the worst experience of their time at law school.

If a lot of my desired career paths didn’t practically require clerking as a prerequisite, I never would have considered doing journal. I’m staring down the reality that I probably just threw away the biggest benefit of taking on extreme debt to go to a clerkship-focused school because I was too burned out to do my best work on write on. I don’t know where to go from here.