It’s Monday, August 31, 2026, my first “official” day of law school, and someone has keyed my car. White stripes loop across the shiny black doors of my Honda CR-V like a bad tattoo. I run my finger along the grooves and race through the journalist’s questions: Who? What? Why? I have no enemies!
Then I check my watch. I’m sweating, and I’m late for Contracts.
“9:00 a.m. Today will be challenging—but not as challenging as tomorrow. Buy in, lock in. Understood?” Professor Carillo asks our section.
“Understood,” I reply, having found my assigned seat with a minute to spare.
The first “official” day of law school was the moment I had worked so hard for, the moment an upperclassman called “an answered prayer.” In retrospect, I now call that first day, and the September that followed, a series of profound humblings that fried my nervous system.
By the end of that first week, I was sure I would fail out. I was sure that I, an English major, had forgotten how to read. So I called my boyfriend, Liam, for survival advice.
“Be a sponge,” he said, “not a sprinkler.”
I like to talk. It is my greatest strength, and it can also be my greatest weakness. A sprinkler sprays everything in reach and absorbs nothing. A sponge sits still and takes it all in. For the rest of September, I tried to absorb what was happening around me instead of broadcasting what I thought I knew. Step one was admitting I had no clue what prima facie meant.
Once I stopped talking, I noticed who was holding me up. Peter Madis, who works in library security, gave me chocolate my first week and has asked how I’m doing every day since. Kendall Madsen, a fellow Double Eagle, drove with me to school through those early weeks. When I was sick and missed a day of school, my Section 1 classmates sent me their notes before I asked.
Not every gift had a person attached. Lost in my first week, I wandered into Kenny-Cottle, the law library until 1996 and now a dystopian warehouse of overflow books, and laughed alone in the stacks.
I schedule my Google Calendar to the second, yet none of those encounters appeared on it.
This past Wednesday, a librarian led a meditation sit and read from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk: “Nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest.” September taught me that law school both is and is not “that serious.” This work can change lives, but you are also a person doing a job. If you practice a monkish detachment from the outcome, dare I say, you might experience real joy.
In Civil Procedure, we learned that courts toss conclusory claims, so I’ll plead carefully—I’m one month in, and I hope I’m wrong about plenty, because being wrong means learning. But the record supports this much: September humbled me, and as a newly minted sponge, I call that humbling a gift.
Grace Lenahan is a first-year law student and brand new Impact blogger at BC Law. Contact her at lenahang@bc.edu.
