Student Stories

Law school was everything I had worked toward. I had done well in undergrad, worked hard to get in, and arrived with high expectations of myself. But almost from the first week, I felt like I was falling behind a version of myself I couldn't quite reach. The Socratic method made me dread going to class. The competitive atmosphere made sharing feel dangerous. I stopped sleeping properly. I stopped enjoying things I used to love.

When I finally went to see a counsellor — mostly because a friend insisted — I expected to be told I needed to try harder. Instead, I was told what I was experiencing had a name, was common, and was treatable.

That conversation changed the trajectory of my experience in law school. Not overnight, and not easily. But knowing that what I was feeling was real, that I wasn't failing as a person, made it possible to start making changes. I began attending therapy regularly. I started being honest with one or two close friends about how I was doing. I found the parts of law school I actually cared about and stopped measuring myself against the parts that never fit me.

If you are in that place right now — uncertain whether what you are feeling is serious enough to deserve attention — I want you to know: it is. You don't have to hit a particular low before your experience counts. Getting help is not a detour from your path. It is part of it.

The term for it is impostor syndrome — the persistent sense that you have fooled everyone and will eventually be found out. It is remarkably common among law students and legal professionals, and remarkably destructive. For me, it manifested as a kind of paralysis: I wouldn't raise my hand in class, I second-guessed every email, I avoided asking professors questions because I was afraid the questions would reveal how little I knew.

What broke the cycle, eventually, was a candid conversation with a second-year student who told me, unprompted, that they had felt exactly the same way. That conversation cost nothing and changed everything. I became that student for other people later, and it became one of the most meaningful things I did in law school.

If impostor syndrome is something you recognize in yourself: you were admitted to law school because the people who reviewed your application believed you belonged. Your presence is not an administrative error.

First year was hard but I pushed through it. I assumed that's what you were supposed to do. Second year, I added a journal, a clinic, a part-time job, and a leadership role in a student group. I stopped exercising. I stopped calling family. I started running on caffeine and the vague sense that I would rest "after."

The numbness crept up so gradually that by the time I noticed it, it had been there for months. I stopped looking forward to anything. Work that used to interest me felt pointless. I was going through the motions perfectly well — getting good marks, meeting deadlines — but I had hollowed out somewhere in the process.

I eventually saw a therapist through the university health service. The process of naming what had happened, and tracing how I had gotten there, was genuinely illuminating. I learned what my actual limits were. I learned that "pushing through" is sometimes the right response and sometimes exactly the wrong one, and that knowing the difference requires paying attention to yourself.

Recovery from burnout is slow. I won't pretend otherwise. But it is real. I graduated. I practice law in a way that I find genuinely meaningful. I sleep. I call my family. Those things are all possible on the other side of it.

My partner and I moved to Halifax together when I started law school. He had a job he liked; I was consumed by a new world he couldn't really see into. We went from talking about everything to me coming home too exhausted to have a real conversation. He felt shut out. I felt guilty and overwhelmed. We argued about things that were really about distance.

What helped us, ultimately, was being honest about what I could actually offer during intense periods — which was less than I wanted it to be — and finding small, consistent things we could do together that didn't require much energy: a walk in the evening, one real meal a week, a rule that law school stayed off the table for one hour on Sundays.

I also talked to someone at student wellness about relationship stress specifically. I hadn't known that was something you could bring to counselling — I assumed it was only for mental illness. It isn't. Struggling to maintain your relationships during law school is a legitimate thing to get support for.

If your relationship is under strain: name it, to yourself and to your partner. It is survivable, and addressing it early is far less costly than letting the distance grow.