Do You Have to Pretend to Belong in Law School to Make It?
Written by Law Clerk Oliver Halliwell
TL;DR: No. Trying to become a more polished, quieter, more “professional” version of yourself to survive law school usually just leads to burnout. For me, the turning point came when I stopped performing and started being honest about how hard law school actually felt. The more honest I became, online and in real life, the more I realized I was not the only one struggling. I also learned that being a good future lawyer has a lot less to do with seeming perfect and a lot more to do with being thoughtful, human, and genuinely caring about people.
Why did I spend so much of my life trying to be smaller?
Because being visible did not always feel safe.
For most of my life, I was quiet. Not in a mysterious, brooding way. More in a “let’s not get bullied today” kind of way.
Growing up openly queer in a small town in western Nebraska teaches you pretty quickly that being fully yourself can come with a cost. I learned early on that humor could soften a room before it turned against me. If I could make people laugh, sometimes I could take the sting out of whatever they were about to say.
That is how I became funny. Not because I was trying to be entertaining, but because I was trying to survive.
At school, I kept my head down. If someone decided to test me, I would make a quick comment, just enough to flip the moment. Sometimes the joke was on them. Sometimes it was on me. Either way, people laughed, and usually that was enough to move on.
Over time, I became observant, hyperaware, emotionally intuitive, and just a little chaotic, though in a contained, legally defensible way.
What happened before law school?
Before law school, I tried a completely different version of reinvention.
In my late teens, I moved to Los Angeles to join an artist development program, because apparently the next logical step after “emotionally resilient Midwest kid” is “move to LA and try to be famous.”
The program focused on being a triple threat: singing, dancing, and acting. I could do one of those confidently, one of those passably, and one of those in a way that should have raised concerns.
While other people were booking Disney roles, I was not exactly giving “beloved child star.” My humor was never especially family-friendly, and at one point a manager suggested I try stand-up comedy, which felt less like career guidance and more like a very specific read on my personality.
So I tried it.
I did open mics. I met comedians I had no business casually speaking to. I had a few surreal moments where I thought, maybe something is actually happening here.
Then I did what many anxious people do when something starts to matter. I cared too much about what other people thought, panicked, and backed away quietly enough to later call it intentional.
How did I end up in law school?
I ended up in law school after my life fell apart and then slowly came back together.
At 22, after a mental health crisis, I moved back to Nebraska, went to college, and through what I can only assume was a clerical error, ended up in law school.
I was never the kind of person who walked into a room and immediately owned it. I did not have a polished elevator pitch. I did not always feel like I belonged in the room at all.
Law school, unfortunately, is not an environment that tends to ease those feelings.
Everyone seems composed. Everyone is networking. Everyone somehow knows exactly when to nod, when to laugh, and when to say, “that’s a great point,” in a way that sounds sincere and not rehearsed.
Meanwhile, I was having internal conversations like: was that a normal sentence? Did I blink enough? Too much?
What did I get wrong about being “professional”?
I thought being professional meant becoming a less interesting version of myself.
That did not make me more confident. It just made me tired.
I toned myself down. I tried to be less funny, less noticeable, less openly myself. At one point I genuinely wondered whether I would be taken more seriously if I just became smaller in every possible way.
That did not solve anything. It only made me exhausted.
By the middle of my 2L year, I hit a point where I realized I could not keep cosplaying as someone else. Not because I suddenly became confident. I did not. I just ran out of energy to keep pretending.
Three signs I was burning out from trying to “fit”
I was constantly editing myself before I spoke.
I confused professionalism with suppressing my personality.
I felt more disconnected the harder I tried to seem put together.
Why did I start posting honestly online?
I started posting honestly because hiding was not working anymore.
Around the same time I was trying to figure out who I was in law school, I was also trying to manage my digital footprint, which already included going viral on TikTok for things that would absolutely make a career services advisor sigh deeply.
I tried to keep that part of my life hidden. Private account. Minimal evidence. Plausible deniability.
But eventually, I missed being honest. I missed being funny without overthinking it.
So during the first week of my 3L year, I propped up my phone and recorded a video about my 1L experience. It was not polished. It was not strategic. It was basically me saying: you are putting way too much pressure on yourself, and nobody actually knows what they are doing.
I posted it, went to bed, and woke up to find that it had gone viral.
Which felt, at best, mildly alarming.
Why did that video matter so much?
It mattered because honesty helped people more than polish ever did.
The week after I posted that video, I got dragged to a law school event, against my will, as tradition requires. People, mostly 1Ls, kept coming up to me saying the same thing: your video made me feel better.
That caught me off guard.
I do not have law school figured out. I am not some model of confidence or composure. Most of law school has felt like bouncing between “I can do this” and “this was clearly a terrible idea.”
But apparently saying that out loud helped.
So I kept posting, not because I think I have all the answers, but because I know what it feels like to sit in a classroom convinced you are the only one struggling while everyone else looks like they are thriving.
They are not. They are often just better at pretending.
Do law students really feel like everyone else has it together?
No. A lot of law students feel overwhelmed, isolated, and unsure of themselves, even when they look fine on the outside.
Law school has an unspoken culture of performance. People are not just trying to learn the law. They are also trying to look competent, composed, ambitious, and unbothered all at once.
That is exhausting.
It also creates this strange shared illusion where everyone thinks they are the only one having a hard time.
What I wish more law students knew
Looking calm is not the same as feeling okay.
Being unsure does not mean you are failing.
You do not need a perfectly curated personality to belong here.
The pressure to perform can be just as draining as the workload itself.
What actually makes someone a good future lawyer?
Being a good future lawyer has a lot more to do with honesty, care, and connection than perfection.
The more I let myself be awkward, sarcastic, and real, the more I realized people do not respond most strongly to perfection. They respond to honesty.
Clients do not need someone who performs “lawyer” flawlessly. They need someone who listens, pays attention, and actually gives a damn.
That shift mattered a lot for me. I stopped treating my personality like a liability and started seeing it as part of what makes me connect with people.
What did working at Zachary W. Anderson Law show me?
It showed me that there are places in the legal profession where you do not have to pretend to belong.
Around the time my TikTok started gaining traction, I applied to work at Zachary W. Anderson Law. The job description ended with, “If you’ve ever been told you’re too much, this is the job for you.”
For me, that did not read like a job posting. It read like a personal invitation.
Working there has been one of the first times I have seen what it looks like to practice law without flattening yourself into a stereotype. It taught me that being a good lawyer is not about performing a role perfectly. It is about doing the work well and caring deeply about the people you are helping.
So, do you have to become someone else to survive law school?
No. Trying to become someone else is usually what breaks you down fastest.
I still do not have everything figured out. I still feel out of place sometimes. That part has not magically disappeared.
What has changed is this: I no longer assume that feeling out of place means I do not belong.
Sometimes it just means I am not interested in pretending.
Three things I would tell any law student who feels out of place
Stop treating your humanity like a professionalism problem.
Do not confuse performance with belonging.
Find people and places that let you show up as a full person.
What do I hope people take from my videos and this story?
I hope people realize they are not the only ones struggling.
If my videos do anything, I hope they reach the person sitting in the library, quietly convinced they are the only one falling apart.
They are not.
They are definitely not.