How I Transformed My Life in 5 Steps - Part 3

Part 3 – From Being a Waiter to a Law School Student

[Continued from Part 2 - From College to Being a Waiter] Coming back home after four years of college and one year post-college without a job, let alone a decent job is unheard of in the Vietnamese culture. Unfortunately for me, this was my predicament.

Looking back to that summer of 1994, I went through what I thought was fatigue, but what I know now to be a mild depression. I remember sleeping a lot but never getting enough sleep. I was always “tired” and I didn’t feel like doing much. A good friend of mine would always try to get me to go out and do something and it would take a real effort on my part to get up, shower, change my clothes, and put on a smile.

This feeling of lethargy and lack of interests in things went on for about 2 months.

At the urging of my parents and not knowing what else to do, I took the LSAT (law school entrance exam) and wrote an essay pleading for the law schools to let me in. Somehow (and I know it wasn’t my grades or test scores) I got in. I’m fairly sure that my essay was the deciding factor because the admissions director at Southern Methodist University (SMU) quoted what I wrote in my essay in their acceptance letter.

However, instead of joy and jubilation, I felt a sense of terror. I was mortified because, once again, I had fallen into that “living by what others wanted for my life” mode and now I’m stuck! What the hell am I going to do in law school? I don’t even want to be a lawyer. But I was so terrified that anyone would find out the truth that I simply pushed it down and once again put on a smile.

I put on a smile a lot that summer, especially when people praised me for getting accepted into SMU, a fairly well-known law school in Texas.

Perhaps it was stupidity or just being blind to the obvious because despite not wanting to be a lawyer, I went anyway. My fall and spring semesters at SMU were spent rollerblading around campus and using cliff notes and cramming sessions to barely pass my classes. My classmates thought I was crazy. I was sabotaging my own grades to prove to my parents just how unhappy I was. Now that’s insane!

As fate would have it, I got my wish but along with it came some awful news.

In late summer of 1996, after rollerblading my way through my first year of law school and barely passing my classes, I received a letter from SMU that would forever change my life.

It was a dismissal letter and when I read it my heart sank. But it wasn’t over just yet because they gave me a chance to explain my case in a committee meeting with my professors and the dean of students. I don’t recall much from that meeting except that when they asked me why I wanted to stay in law school, my half-hearted response was obvious to everyone in that room, on that day, that I didn’t want to be in law school.

And when I received the final phone call from the dean, that was exactly what he told me,

“Steve, it didn’t seem to me like you really wanted to be here in law school.”

The crazy thing was that after hearing those words, I felt a sense of relief and thanked him! Because for the first time in a long time, someone heard my cries.

After that brief feeling of relief came fear. How in the world am I going to tell my parents about this?!

The next steps that I took were perhaps some of the most difficult and lonely steps I would ever take in my life. I would now have to tell my mom and dad that once again, I had failed them. By failing, I had also brought shame to our family name because my father was a well-respected physician in the Vietnamese community here in Dallas.

The words that came out of my mom’s mouth and the look of disgust and disappointment on her face ripped my heart open more than any physical wound could ever do.

That evening and for the next four months were some of the toughest times in my life. I felt so alone, so abandoned, and so misunderstood.

Check back for “Part 4 – From a Law School Student to the “Light Bulb” Moment.“