For Present-Day-Me

This does what a first draft should do: it gets your thinking on the page. The draft both describes the problem and enacts it.

The emotional and intellectual center of the writing is your panel experience, which both documents the collapse of your confidence and perhaps illuminates some of the causes. As you write, one response to discovering that your approach to law school admission was atypical of those also speaking would have been "Okay, that's your way; I did it my way." Another is to wonder, if you didn't do it the other way, whether you belong at all. That this was the actual outcome alerts us to the importance of the "not belonging" feeling at the center of the syndrome from which you've been suffering.

"Not belonging" sensations are a rather common response to the way law school withholds reinforcement and regresses peoples' adult selves in the direction of high school. But for some students, separated by class background, personal history, and other factors from the population around them, the conviction that they are ineradicably other can take very destructive hold. Your writing also reminds us that previous experiences that led to doubts about safety or belonging at earlier stages of educational life can cause the present sense to redouble. Hence the significant designation, "present-day me."

But the draft also recapitulates the experience you see as the low point: it shows up wanting to be told how to get better. You feel for yourself that being told how to get better isn't how to get better. Regeneration lies in planning and executing it for oneself, which is what your not-present-day selves have done so many other times.

Another draft that draws upon Frank Putnam's summary of personality-state theory might be productive for you. "Present-day me" isn't a new and puzzlingly disabled identity standing alone: it's a personality state, resulting from dissociations produced by law school. It hasn't destroyed any other of your states, and doesn't need to be destroyed itself. What is needed is merger, communication between and incorporation of this and other states, to produce growth through the phenomenon we call "change." This is how we change, through the recognition and merger of separate personality states into new and larger versions of ourselves. The current draft stands opposed to "present-day me," not hostile to her but afraid of the consequences and meaning of her existence. The same materials, differently filtered through another kind of writing, can show the clearer and yet not radically distorted view of yourself—including but not limited to the silencing you've experienced in law school—that is the regenerated image you look for in your dream.