When was the last time you really failed? As law students, we are trained to treat that question like a beast that we must learn to both tame and strategically unleash. Failure becomes a tool we use to make an impression; it’s not about what impression failure left on us. It’s a hot topic in interviews, but seems to be denied in contexts outside of that. I mostly hear about failure being raised as a spectre from the past, as a demarcation of an old way of being coming to a close, and as a sign of new beginnings. The failures that still haunt us seldom see the light of day.
With all that said, and with my preparations for interviews higher and higher on my list as the days I am given 17 minutes to show my true self to someone I have never met loom, I want to tell you about my greatest failure. It is still very much a living, breathing beast, and it stems from one of the best decisions I have made in my 25-year life.
I have been told that I should be a doctor since I became old enough to understand what that meant. I was led to believe that it was the only avenue worth pursuing. I was to either harness the human power of healing, or I was to sell out by doing something morally less worthy, regardless of what that was. I am grateful for my medical family members, but they certainly, albeit somewhat unintentionally, made me feel as though medicine was the only redeeming way forward.
My father was especially responsible for that, despite his good intentions. He could imagine nothing more rewarding than his own pursuits, which are frankly pretty hard to argue with.
I wish all of you could meet him, but if I were to distill his character into a few sentences then I’d say this. He is a fixer, who lives to relieve others of their burdens. He does so quietly and thanklessly. He spends his days putting hearing-restoring medical devices into three-month-old babies’ grapefruit-sized heads, bridging the gap between silence and sound. His research continues to show that children’s brains are a neuroplastic tour-de-force that should not be underestimated. He cares widely, deeply, and indiscriminately. He is the product and promoter of socialized medicine, and it’s doctors like him that keep the system running. He has been my hero for a very long time.
In spite of that pressure, I decided to write the LSAT in September 2016, less than a month after writing the MCAT for the second and final time. I quietly turned down the medically-relevant master’s programs that I had planned on doing in the years I would take off between my undergrad and whatever came next. Over the next year, all the pieces fell together. Law became a question, then a pursuit. Just because I had been told my entire life that I would be good at something didn’t mean that I had to do it. I walked onto campus, jetlagged and overwhelmed, less than 48 hours after coming home from the United Kingdom. I knew exactly one lawyer. I had never met a law student, clerk, or a judge. After about two days of classes, I knew I had found exactly what I was looking for.
But this is about failure, and it’s about one I may not able to conquer or correct. It is the kind of failure that I know I am not alone in facing, either. I am sure Osgoode’s halls are filled with those who have been faced with a similar type of pain. Many children let down their parents; some just do it professionally.
I told my father I would be applying to law school in January 2017. In doing so, I shattered his concept of my future in favour of building a new, stronger, and brighter one for myself. At the time, and throughout the application process and until now, he has been outwardly supportive. I know he’s proud. I know he’s happy that I’ve “found my groove”, as he would say. Still, every so often, his heart gets the best of him. “You would’ve been such a good doctor, Em.” Whenever he says it, it rattles for hours through my head.
For a long time, I didn’t know how to handle that. At first, I fought back and rejected what he was saying. I reminded him that it was all in the past, and that it was never going to happen in the future. The way I engaged with the feeling that I had failed him no doubt ensured that it cast a longer shadow than it needed to. In recent weeks, however, my tune has changed somewhat. Against all odds, there’s a light in all this interview-related self-reflection. From it has come the answer I wasn’t counting on, and it’s one that I wanted to share in case it helps a few of you.
Now, when my dad tells me that I would’ve been a great surgeon, I say, “Maybe, dad.” Because it’s true. Maybe I would have been. We are all full of eternal maybes. We left so much behind to go to law school, and there are so many other ways we could have built a future. There is peace to be found in accepting that of many roads we could have walked down, we chose this one. It turns out that my father also taught me the very lesson that helped me face having failed him, too. He taught me to make a decision, and then, to make it the right one.
Ultimately, what I am trying to remember is this: as painful as failure is, it is often profoundly necessary. I hope your fear of it does not stand in the way of fate. Or luck. Or life. Or anything of the sort that you believe in. We will feel like we’ve failed, but we need not be paralyzed by it. I may never be the doctor that he wanted, but I’ll always be his daughter. Something tells me that someday, that will be enough.