on being enough

—Laura Brown | Nashville, Tenn. | 09.27.20

For a large part of my adolescence—high school and college—I was not-so-secretly in love with my best friend.

He was a handsome, brilliant boy, who constantly challenged me. We went to senior prom together. We went grocery shopping together. We skipped college classes to go hiking through the snow in the Smokies. We debated philosophy and economics and I was desperately in love with him.

In all the time we spent together, he never once kissed me.

Until the eve of my senior year of undergrad, when he helped me move into my apartment, crawled into bed with me, and held me while he explained that he felt the same way about me, but “it wasn’t enough to matter.”

The next day he left me to move to Cambridge to start at Harvard Law. I remember dropping him off and feeling like I was having an out-of-body experience.

I spent the next six months like a crazy, redneck Elle Woods (if Elle Woods used her college loans to buy a wild off-the-track racehorse—yes, I did that. Yes, I am still paying for it. Yes, it was a mistake).

I was desperate to prove to him that I was good enough. I threw my crying into studying for the LSAT. I spent my evenings studying logic games and reading legal paragraphs. In order for me to qualify for any law school of significance, I needed to score at least a 170 on the exam.

I opened the email with my test results while I was at a bar with my friends, watching my college team play in March Madness.

I scored a 163, a full quartile lower than I’d needed to be.

I had to face it. There’s no way I could get into law school. He was right. I wasn’t enough for the Harvard Law life he wanted to live, here were the test results to prove it.

I knew it was a weakness I could never, ever confess to.

So I lied.

I told people I got a 170 on the LSAT, but that I “had chosen not to go to law school.” An insignificant lie, but one that has hid my shame for over a decade.

I scored a 163 on the LSAT.

Instead of going to law school, I moved to D.C. for an internship and stayed there for 7 years. I got pulled out of my comfort zone in a million unquantifiable ways and met a huge group of some of the greatest, smartest, most educated people I've ever had that privilege to know. Instead of studying law, I got a front-row seat to the best policy-making and media years of the hopeful Obama administration. It changed my life.

And so, here's the kicker—the thing I wish I could go back and tell my anguished 22-year-old self: I never belonged in law school.

That 163 was a blessing. Here's what happened instead: I worked my way up in the D.C. media world, won some awards for innovation, then finally moved back to my hometown of Nashville. I run my own media brand. I just finished a Master's degree from Middle Tennessee State in Mass Communication. This summer I applied to a top-25 B-school—that competes with Harvard—and not only was I good enough to get in, I got a scholarship. And then I felt brave enough and confident enough to ask them to negotiate that scholarship, and so they tripled it.

I never belonged with him—a person who made me feel like I could never be enough, but leeched on my adoration like a drug addict. I say “no more” to the emotionally unavailable men who trot around on a high horse that they can't ride. I can ride my own damn horse, thank you very much. And I guess that's the real lesson of my LSAT lie—send eviction notices to all the boys who pay rent in your brain telling you that you aren't enough. Find the people who think you are. Because you are.