What does it mean to earn something?
According to Oxford Languages (the source Google uses when you ask it to define a word) it means “to gain deservedly in return for one’s behaviour or achievements.”1 The word deserve means to “do something or have or show qualities worthy of reward or punishment.”
The concepts of earning and deserving have been on my mind a lot lately.
For years I have longed to go back to school and get a Master’s Degree in English. It is what I had intended to do before I took the LSAT on a whim to prove to Norman how hard it was to get a decent score.
I failed miserably in my self-imposed task, and accidentally wound up going to law school instead.
A man recently told me that it’s not possible to “accidentally” go to law school because it requires a lot of time and effort and cannot be done without deliberation. He was talking about finishing law school. I agree that you cannot finish law school by accident. It is, however, perfectly possible to start law school by accident.
I took the LSAT abruptly and with no preparation. I had to go to Mississippi to take it because I registered so late that all the testing centers in Louisiana were full. I did not take it with the intention of scoring well. I certainly didn’t take it with the intention of going to law school.
I took the LSAT because Norman kept saying I should go to law school and I was trying to prove to him that I wasn’t smart enough. I failed spectacularly in that goal.
The LSAT is scored using a range from 120-180. I scored a 165. At the time, that placed me in the 93rd percentile. That was nearly 18 years ago, and in the intervening time the average score has increased. Today, a score of 165 would only place me in the 90th percentile.
I later learned that most people who take the LSAT spend months, sometimes years preparing for the for the exam. Many people take it more than once. I just wandered into a classroom and scored in the top ten percent of the nation without even trying.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, both my physical mailbox and my email inbox were inundated with messages from law schools all over the country trying to persuade me to attend their institution. How they all found out about me is a mystery; ostensibly LSAT scores are not given to a university until you apply. Nonetheless, I received dozens of letters and messages offering to waive application fees, inviting me to tour campuses, and telling me I was eligible for all different kinds of scholarships.
At that point, it seemed kind of ridiculous to not even apply to any schools. I decided I would apply to one school and one school only. Conventional advice is “to apply to at least a dozen law schools: five reaches, five midrange schools, and two safety schools.”2 I made a deal with myself that I would apply to one school, and if I got in that would mean I was meant to go.
I chose LSU because it has the highest bar passage rate in Louisiana, and at that time I had no intention of leaving the state. Not only was I accepted, I was also offered their “Faculty Merit Scholarship” which would cover 75% of my tuition, provided I consistently ranked in the top third of my class.
The whole thing seemed meant to be.
So, I went. Norman was thrilled. He even started introducing me to his friends, and letting me come along when he hung out with them, something he had refused to do before even though we had been semi-together for about five years at that point.
In hindsight, I should not have married a man who took five years to decide I was good enough to meet his friends. I definitely should not have married a man who left me behind with no money and no transportation while a category five hurricane was barreling down upon the city.
A while back we were having an argument and I threw it in his face that he left me to die during Hurricane Katrina. He laughed and said “there were two million people in that city and you think it was my responsibility to save them all?”
I pointed out that the population of New Orleans was under 500,000 at that point, and told him that I was not saying he should have saved all of them, only that he should have saved the woman he had been sleeping with for a year and half.
He called me crazy. The man was always calling me crazy. For twenty years I let him call me crazy, because he claimed that he “put up with more crazy from [you] than any other man would tolerate,” and I believed him.
I no longer care what men are willing to “tolerate” from me. I am who I am. If they don’t like me, they are free to go away and leave me in peace.
In that same argument, Norman claimed that he had known for years that I wanted to leave him and that I was just waiting for the right time. For reasons I do not really understand, that hurt. To begin with, the claim was patently ridiculous, given that we had just moved across country to a town I had never even been in because it had been his lifelong dream to live in the Pacific Northwest. In Louisiana I had a good job and a decent home. I had power and authority and a social support system. In Washington, I had nothing and no one.
Many people are of the opinion that Norman pushed me to move there because he knew the divorce laws would favor him. I think he pushed me to move there because he thought it would make it impossible for me to leave him.
None of that was the source of my pain, however. What hurt, deep down to the point that I cried for days, was that he knew I was miserable for years and he did not feel that he had any obligation to alter our situation so that I could enjoy my life.
He knew I hated being a lawyer. I told him so repeatedly. He kept telling me that I just needed to try harder, and that I needed to spend time with people he knew who could help me advance my career. He kept talking about how wonderful it would be when I became a judge, even though I kept telling him I didn’t want to be a judge.
He knew I wanted to go back to school, to be a writer, and to maybe teach at a college level. He knew because I told him. He kept telling me if I wanted to write I could do so in my free time. He refused to understand that being a lawyer drained me intellectually and emotionally to the point where there was nothing left. He said I could go back to school when the kids were grown. He thought it gave me something to look forward to.
Norman now claims that he “enthusiastically supported” my desire to go back to school and start bartending again. He claims that I completely made up the moment when I told him that was what I wanted to do and he replied “that kind of behavior will not be tolerated in [his] house.”
I was a bartender for years in my 20s. It’s how I paid for my Bachelor’s degree. One time, and one time only, in all of those years, I went out after work with some coworkers, had too much to drink, and had to call him for a ride. ONCE. In four years. But that was all it took for him to decide that bartending turned me into a degenerate.
It must infuriate him that I deal cards at a casino now. That has to be worse than bartending on his moral scale.
My favorite thing about his new claim that he was all for me giving up the law is that he expressly put in his petition for divorce that he didn’t “consent” to me changing careers. If we take his version of events as true, that means he committed perjury for the sake of getting a judge to order me to pay alimony.
He would rather commit a felony than get a job. I’m okay with that version of events. I’m going to go with that story from now on.
At one point in the mess that was my breakdown I tried to get him to start a multi-media company with me. He would produce music and I would publish books. I had a name for the business and a general idea of what I wanted to do. He told me if I wanted to discuss it, I had to schedule a meeting with him, draw up a business plan, and make a formal pitch to him.
He was always telling me I had to schedule meetings to meet with him. I don’t mean saying something like “let’s talk about this after the kids leave for school.” I mean “will next Tuesday at three p.m. work for you?” I would always get anxious and cancel them at the last minute. I didn’t think I should have to have an appointment to talk to my husband. It’s unspeakably sad that the prospect of having a conversation with my husband would give me a panic attack.
I changed my entire being to fit into what Norman considered “appropriate.” We both entered into our marriage with the expectation that I would continue to do what he wanted me to do and be who he wanted me to be. It was all fine, right up to the day that it wasn’t.
I left my husband for too many reasons to list here, but one big one was that I wanted to go back to school and he didn’t want me to. After a spectacular breakdown of my mental health, resulting in spending nine-months with violent cocaine addict and over two years of homelessness, I managed to get an apartment a few months ago and applied to the MA program in English at the small local university.
I was accepted, of course. Although the college is well-respected regionally, it is a very small school and their admissions criteria are not particularly stringent. They didn’t even ask to see my law school transcripts. Once they were able to officially confirm that I have a BA in English, I was in. I was supposed to start in the fall of 2026.
Then things got weird.
My taxes are all messed up from my divorce, and I can’t afford to hire someone to sort them out, so I didn’t feel confident in applying for student loans. At some point the IRS is going to track me down and tell me I’ve screwed everything up, at which point I’ll tell them that I know that but I don’t know how to fix it. Besides, in civilized countries the revenue service calculates your tax obligation for you and just send you a bill. It’s a special little quirk of this country that citizens are made to figure out their own taxes, and threatened with jail time if they do it incorrectly.
Fortunately, the local university offers graduate assistantships. In exchange for teaching part-time, the university gives GAs a full waiver of tuition and fees, along with a modest stipend. I spent the fall lining up former employers and professors willing to write letters of recommendation, and began brainstorming what I would write my literary analysis on. I hadn’t written one in over fifteen years, and I was not confident I still had the knack. Nonetheless, I believed I would be a strong applicant.
The university offers two different paths for an MA in English: an emphasis on literature or an emphasis on creative writing. The first full week of January, I sent an email to my assigned advisor to ask if I would be permitted to do both. I included in my email a statement that I had graduated cum laude from a well-respected law school, so I felt confident in my ability to handle any additional course load entailed by doing both programs.
I thought it was a yes or no question. Instead, she asked to meet with me early the following week.
I had gone back to the photo lab for another rush season, and they kept me on part-time when rush ended, so my free time was incredibly limited. We managed to agree on a time between my shift at my day job and my shift at my night job, and met via zoom.
The meeting did not go how I had anticipated.
“What do you think about being a graduate assistant?” she asked.
“I’m definitely going to apply,” I replied. “I’m working on getting the materials together now.”
At that point, I still had almost three full months before the deadline, and my application was still in the planning stages.
“No,” she said. “I mean now. One of our GAs dropped out, and we need someone to teach his classes. Can you start next week?”
Just like that, the life that I had finally managed to get back into some semblance of order was thrown into absolute chaos. I liked my supervisors at the lab, and they had pushed hard to get me kept on in the new year, so I couldn’t just walk away without at least some notice. My job at the casino is what keeps the roof over my head, so obviously I still had to make it to my shifts there.
I managed to throw together an application that could be presented to the rest of the department and ultimately the University administration in under 48 hours. I convinced two people to drop everything and write me letters of recommendations. Because I didn’t have a recent literary analysis, they had me submit a piece from my undergraduate work, along with one of my legal briefs.
My advisor was incredible. She helped me get everything organized, and even enrolled me in classes when we discovered the system did not yet know I was going to attend. One week after my zoom meeting with her, I attended my first class as a graduate student. Sort of.
The next day, I taught my first college class.
I know I should be thrilled. I am doing the thing I have always wanted to do. Yet somehow I can’t shake a profound feeling of melancholy.
I don’t feel like I earned it. The only reason I am here is because someone else had to quit abruptly, and the department was desperate for someone to fill his role.
I got this position not on my own merits, but because of the misfortune of another. My application was submitted as a formality, because there had to be something in my file, not as a demonstration of my worth to the school.
There is, of course, an argument to be made that I would have been given the position this fall, after I had properly passed through the application process. I have an incredible academic and professional record, and this is a small school in a small town.
The argument can be made that I deserve this position.
But I still don’t feel like I earned it.
