Months before graduating from law school, one question started to come up very often: What's next?

It's a perfectly reasonable question. For most people, it's probably just another way of asking how I’m doing. But when you have spent most of your life measuring time in accomplishments, What's next? can feel less like small talk and more like an evaluation.

For years, I almost always had an answer: a degree, an internship, a fellowship, graduation, the bar exam. There was always another milestone to point toward.

Then I graduated. I took the bar. And suddenly, there was space. For the first time in years, I wondered why I felt so uncomfortable without another accomplishment ready to announce.

*Then, just days ago, I learned that I failed the bar exam.*
Suddenly, the question wasn’t simply: What’s next?

It was: What happens when what’s next isn’t what you planned?

I had spent months preparing for an exam that felt like the final barrier between everything I had worked toward and the professional identity I had imagined for myself. I knew, intellectually, that failing the bar would not erase my degree, experiences, or capabilities. But knowing something intellectually and believing it emotionally are two very different things.

I was devastated. Not simply because I would have to take the exam again, but because I had to confront something I had spent years trying to outrun: the possibility of not being exceptional.

I started wondering: When did an ordinary life, or an ordinary setback, become something I was afraid of?

When Achievement Becomes an Identity

Long before law school, many of us learned that achievement came with rewards. Good grades earned praise, college acceptances brought celebration, and scholarships, internships, and awards became evidence that we were doing life correctly.

For high achievers, accomplishment becomes more than something we do; it becomes how we understand who we are.

“I'm successful because I achieve. I'm valuable because I'm impressive.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with achievement. I'm proud of many of the things I have worked for, and I don’t believe the answer is pretending not to care about success. Ambition has opened doors for me. It has pushed me through difficult seasons. It has allowed me to imagine possibilities for myself that once felt distant.

The problem begins when achievement stops being something we pursue and becomes something we need to feel worthy. Law is particularly good at reinforcing that relationship.

Before you even become a lawyer, there is a hierarchy waiting: LSAT scores, school rankings, grades, internships, clerkships, firm prestige, billable hours, and partnership.

There is always another way to measure yourself. And there is almost always someone nearby who appears to be doing better, which makes it remarkably easy to turn your life into one long performance review.

But what happens when the review doesn’t go your way?

When Failure Feels Like an Identity Crisis

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with failing at something you worked incredibly hard to achieve. Sometimes it's mourning the future you had already imagined. I had pictured the relief of passing the bar, the celebration, and finally closing a chapter that had demanded so much of me.

What surprised me was how quickly disappointment began turning into questions about my identity. Am I as capable as I thought? What will people think? Am I falling behind?

These questions reveal something uncomfortable about achievement culture: we often treat success as evidence of our abilities while treating failure as evidence of our inadequacy.

Yet the two aren't symmetrical. Passing or failing an exam reflects your performance on a particular occasion, not the entirety of your intelligence, potential, work ethic, or worth.

Failure also has a public dimension. Sharing a disappointing outcome can feel like announcing that you've let down an audience, even when no one has actually judged you.

I'm still learning how to separate the disappointment of an outcome from disappointment in myself. I can acknowledge that I failed an exam without accepting that I'm a failure. I can be upset about having to try again without treating the delay as proof that I don't belong in this profession.

And perhaps most importantly, I can allow myself to be disappointed without immediately transforming that disappointment into a motivational success story.

Sometimes failure hurts before it teaches us anything.

The Moving Finish Line

Achievement also has an inconvenient habit: it moves the finish line.

Think about something you once desperately wanted: admission to law school, an internship, graduation, or your first legal job. Before it happened, you imagined how different you would feel once you could finally say, I did it. Then you did, celebrated briefly, and found yourself facing another question: What's next?

The legal profession offers an almost endless ladder of increasingly prestigious opportunities.

Eventually, “enough” becomes difficult to locate.

And when we fall short of a milestone, the finish line doesn’t disappear. It simply moves further away, sometimes taking our sense of accomplishment with it.

The cost is not merely professional. We can begin evaluating our entire lives using the logic of a resume. A year is good because we accomplished a lot. A person is impressive because of where they work. A decision is worthwhile because other people recognize its value.

Even rest becomes productive. We read to become better thinkers, exercise to become more disciplined, travel to create content, and turn hobbies into side hustles.

Everything has to lead somewhere.

But what if some things are allowed to exist simply because they make a life enjoyable?

Is This Bigger Than Me?

My relationship with achievement is hardly unique. The legal profession rewards high standards, and for good reason: preparation, diligence, and excellence matter. But there is a difference between striving for excellence and fearing anything less.

An American Bar Association article distinguishes between adaptive perfectionism, characterized by high standards and flexibility, and maladaptive perfectionism, associated with self-criticism, fear of judgment, and treating mistakes as personal deficiencies.

That distinction feels especially relevant now.

Wanting to do excellent work is not the same as needing every piece of work to prove that you are excellent.

The ABA’s Survey of Lawyer Well-Being also examines distress and burnout across the profession. While these challenges extend beyond individual ambition, they raise an important question: What happens when achievement is constantly measured but our humanity is treated as secondary?

What Are We Actually Afraid Of?

When I ask myself why being “ordinary” can feel frightening, I don't think the fear is really about ordinariness. I think it's about what we have attached to it.

Maybe ordinary means I didn't live up to my potential or meet the expectations of those who believed in me. Maybe it means watching classmates become partners, judges, or founders while I pursue something less recognizable. Or perhaps it means no longer being the person people point to and say, *She's doing so well.*
When people have always known you as ambitious, slowing down can feel like disappointing an audience.

For those of us who are the first in our families to enter certain spaces, that feeling can become even more complicated. Achievement may represent sacrifice, mobility, representation, or responsibility. When others have sacrificed to help you get somewhere, falling short can feel like letting down more than yourself.

But potential is not a debt. We don't owe the world the most impressive version of our lives, and we don't become less deserving of the lives we want simply because reaching them takes longer than expected.

Redefining Success: Building Your Own Scoreboard

Maybe the problem is not that we need to become comfortable with being ordinary. Maybe we need a better definition of what makes a life extraordinary.

The Institute for Well-Being in Law identifies six dimensions of well-being: emotional, occupational, intellectual, spiritual, physical, and social. Its framework reminds us that professional success is only one part of a meaningful life.

Imagine evaluating your life across those dimensions. Instead of asking only how your career is going, consider your relationships, health, sense of purpose, and capacity for joy. Those questions create a very different scoreboard.

There is nothing wrong with aspiring to BigLaw, partnership, public office, or your own firm. The question is whether those things are your definition of success or the one you inherited.

And whether you can still recognize your own worth when something doesn’t go according to plan.

Failing the bar hasn't changed my ambition or desire to become an attorney. It has, however, forced me to confront how much of my identity I attached to achieving those goals on a particular timeline.

Imagine success without an audience: no LinkedIn announcement, congratulations, or impressive résumé line. Would you still want it?

Then ask yourself what would make this a good year even if nobody else knew about it. What relationships do you want to deepen? What do you want an ordinary Tuesday to feel like? What are you unwilling to sacrifice for professional success?

When setbacks happen, it may also help to separate three questions: What happened? What can I learn or change? What am I telling myself this means about who I am?

The first two can guide your next steps. The third deserves careful examination.

But perhaps one of the simplest practices is something we can do for one another: celebrate more than accomplishments.

Ask your friend whether she's happy before asking when she's making partner. Celebrate the recent graduate who is finding her way and the attorney who chooses a less prestigious but more fulfilling path.

And practice answering “What's next?” without believing your answer has to impress anyone.

The Life Beyond the Resume

I don’t know exactly what the next few months will look like. I know there will be more studying, another exam, and moments when I wish my timeline looked different.

I also know that I graduated from law school, built meaningful relationships, and became someone I'm proud of. None of that disappeared when I opened my bar results.

I'm trying to make room for two truths: I can be deeply disappointed in an outcome and still be proud of the person who experienced it.

Maybe I'll build an extraordinary career, family, business, or community. Maybe I'll build all four. Maybe I'm still figuring it out.

What I'm beginning to understand is that a meaningful life cannot depend entirely on a series of successful outcomes. If it does, every setback threatens to take the whole thing away.

I still want to achieve extraordinary things. But I no longer want to believe that failing to achieve one of them makes me ordinary in the worst sense of the word.

Perhaps the real measure of a life isn’t how impressive it looks when everything goes according to plan. Perhaps it's whether that life still feels worth living, building, and believing in when it doesn’t.

If my life is meaningful to me, why does it need to look extraordinary to anyone else?

Resources for Readers

The American Bar Association's Survey of Lawyer Well-Being provides current research on mental health, burnout, workplace culture, and well-being across the legal profession.

The ABA article “Recovery: A Litigator's Secret Weapon” includes a useful discussion of healthy versus unhealthy perfectionism, self-criticism, boundaries, and treating self-care as part of performance rather than a reward for it.

The Institute for Well-Being in Law offers resources for lawyers, legal employers, law schools, and other members of the profession interested in building healthier and more sustainable approaches to legal practice.

The ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs (CoLAP) provides well-being resources and connects lawyers, judges, and law students with confidential Lawyer Assistance Programs throughout the country.