Death wish: my life as a bar reviewer

If misery loves company, let me recount my own miserable experience at the bar examination just so this present batch of examinees will feel they are not alone.

In the summer of my bar year, I took an unpaid leave of absence from my job. My family of six became a charity case overnight, living on doles from my sisters. Everything we needed—from food, my four children’s daily school allowances, down to our toothpaste—came from doles. All the money that I had left went to the review.

I felt I needed to rent a place of my own near La Salle Taft because our house is so small that there is neither space nor peace and quiet for studying. For days, under the sweltering heat of the sun and even during a drizzle, my wife Arlene and I walked the length and breadth of Malate to find the cheapest dorm. On the third day, the search ended on the third floor of an old house on Ocampo Street near Osmeña Highway. The room was 3 by 5 meters, with no window and a very low ceiling which, with my arms outstretched and standing on tiptoe, I could almost touch.

The room reminded me of the torture chambers of martial law which I had only read about. A single light bulb illuminated the room; if you turned it off, the entire place would be plunged into pitch black darkness. I brought in an electric fan because without ventilation the room became a steaming hot cauldron in the afternoon. Still, I had to strip down to my boxers and drink gallons of water to survive the summer.

As soon as the review started, I went into hibernation. I lost all concept of time. And I would not advise anyone to follow my study habit; it was so crazy it might kill you. I read everything I laid my hands on—textbooks and handouts, and all sorts of reviewers and secret tips from the so-called red code, blue code, violet code (even the Da Vinci code if this were available).

My study time was the equivalent of a death wish. Some reviewers had it from sunup to sundown, others in reverse. Mine was from sunup to midnight—18 full hours of mental torture so extreme I was scared my brain would turn from solid to liquid to gas and then evaporate completely.

Or worse, I might drop dead before the bar exam could even start.

I developed manic-compulsive behavior for studying. There were instances when, in the dead of night, lying in bed and trying to catch some sleep, I would make a mental picture of the materials I had just finished reading. If I could not remember them with sufficient clarity, I would get up and return to my books, giving up sleep altogether to resume my review until I dropped from sheer exhaustion, usually face first on the book I was reading. Then I would awaken with a numbing pain in my neck and my butt.

While I was completely indifferent to the concept of time, I was obsessively cognizant of my meager resources, desperate to make the most of every peso. I’d have crackers and coffee for breakfast, crackers and coffee for lunch, and crackers and coffee for dinner. A rice meal was a luxury. I learned that a diet of crackers and coffee would stretch P100 for three days. My weight dropped from 145 to 118 pounds, and I didn’t have to visit the toilet for days because of serious constipation from that diet.

The hardest part was going home during weekends. I would text in advance the time of my arrival, and my kids would be waiting for me at the gate and run to me with open arms as soon as I came into view. We reenacted the scenes at the airport arrival area when overseas Filipino workers would walk into their family’s loving embrace. It was a struggle to hold back the tears, but at the same time I found it amusing given that I wasn’t really away the whole time. My two girls would be particularly emotional over the unwanted separation, and insisted they sleep in the same bed with me and my wife every night.

But time would fly and before I knew it, it would be time to leave. I’d wake up before the break of dawn, carefully extricating myself from my kids’ embrace. My wife and I would bid each other goodbye without looking into each other’s eyes. Sometimes, before I leave, she would hand me a large mayonnaise bottle filled with adobo, which, with self-control and ingenuity, would feed me for a week.

The best thing that happened during my bar review was finding God along the way. I became a devotee of the Black Nazarene both by choice and by force of circumstance, in order to blunt the pain and loneliness that I was dealing with daily. Fridays, I would squeeze into a throng of sweaty and bath-deprived churchgoers in Quiapo to tell God of my own regrets and lamentation, of how close I was to giving up except that I owed it to my wife and my kids to finish what I had started. It’s embarrassing and difficult for me to admit now, but you know what, I can’t remember how many times I cried during my bar review.

The millions who believe in the Black Nazarene can’t be all wrong, and my own experience tells me they can’t be so right. At the very least, the image of Christ carrying the cross gives people hope, and when you’re very poor or seriously sick, or just plain desperate, hope is more than enough. After only a few visits to Quiapo Church, I knew by heart the Nazareno Song. And sometimes, it was difficult to keep myself from laughing out loud, wondering what if a friend—or a professor—would see me with my hands in the air and dancing with the other devotees, singing “Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno…”

Passing the bar was anticlimactic. To tell you the truth, I was almost unperturbed by the news because of that certain numbness I developed after my journey. When you have gone through a lot, your reaction to emotional experiences is sort of blunted.

All I can say is that passing the bar was bittersweet in the sense that suddenly, I realized there was a price to pay for becoming a lawyer. I realized I had a new life to live, or else all the sacrifices that I made to get this far would be pointless. It meant I had to walk away from my first love—writing.

I was a journalist before I was rudely awakened by this awfully painful reality bite—that the salary of a journalist is not enough to raise a family, put children through school, and afford you the luxury of living a decent life away from the temptations of corruption.

It also meant I had to walk away from the newsroom and say goodbye to my beloved colleagues, like Dessa, Julius Gonzales, Joey Isabelo, Flor Perez, Ramon Nuñez, Mang Honor, Mac, Nongni and Nangni, Ambet, Fred Aquino, Direk Leo, Mang Rudy, Chang Jasmin, and all the PTV people who were my surrogate family throughout our long and colorful love-hate relationship.

I thought all along that passing the bar would be the ultimate high, but now I’m not so sure. I have yet to find out if that is true.

Adel Abillar is a private practitioner with a small law office in Quezon City where, he says, “I alternate between being boss and messenger.” He obtained his law and prelaw degrees from Manuel L. Quezon University and University of Santo Tomas, respectively.