In therapy last week, we decided to explore my time in law school. I seem to be haunted by it. I feel like there’s this piece of elastic that constantly pulls me back to 1999, the year I graduated and left Virginia for good.

I told her a story that I hadn’t told her before. And I’d forgotten how sad and angry the story made me.

I got through three years of law school at the University of Virginia without putting down any roots, without leaving any fingerprints behind, without leaving any evidence that I was ever there. I made no good friends. I didn’t become close with any of my professors. I didn’t join any law school organizations. I tried out for two law journals and didn’t get picked. I was intimidated by everyone at law school, students and professors alike. I rarely spoke up in class unless called upon. When I’d been younger, I could take solace in knowing that if I wasn’t cool, I was at least smart. But in law school, everyone seemed cooler than me and smarter than me. I had nothing going for myself.

I was a ghost.

My grades didn’t help, either. At UVa Law, as in many law schools, courses are graded on a very broad curve. (Your grade is based on a written final exam.) About half the students in every class will get a B plus. You don’t get higher or lower unless you do very well or pretty badly. Me, I got a mix of B pluses and Bs, and in a couple of classes I got a little bit lower than that. No wonder my first-year law firm interviews never went well.

None of this made me feel any better about being in law school, of course.

There was, however, one class in which I got an A. It was a class in U.S. constitutional history up to the Civil War. I took the class during the fall semester of my final year of law school. I was thrilled when I got my grade. After all this time, I’d actually gotten an A! Maybe I wasn’t an idiot after all!

The thing is, the professor didn’t know me. It was a class of about 100 people. During each class session, there were three or four students “on call,” meaning that they could expect to be called on during that hour. Professor Harrison went down the roster alphabetically, so you had a general idea of what day your name was coming up. I had actually kind of looked forward to the day I’d be on call. Now, I can’t remember if he wound up not asking any questions on the day I was on call, or if he was out sick that day and forgot to pick up the list in the same place when he came back, or what, but for whatever reason, I never got called on.

So a couple of days after I got my fall grades — a few weeks into the spring semester — I decided I would try to get to know him. He was a little pompous, but I thought I should get to know at least one of my law school professors, and why not the guy who’d given me an A? I could let him know I’d gotten an A in his class and ask him what I’d done right so that I could apply it to other classes. Of course, I knew the reason I’d done so well on the exam was because it hadn’t been a typical law exam where you apply legal principles to a set a facts, so there was really no way to apply it to my other classes, and I worried that that’s what he would tell me. But I couldn’t just say to him, “Hi, I got an A in your class. Please like me!” So I needed a pretense.

That afternoon I saw him walking down the hall carrying a few books and notebooks. I took a deep breath, determined to swallow my fear. I walked over to him and said:

“Professor Harrison, are you on your way back to your office?”

He replied, in a cold, irritated voice:

“No, I’m on my way to class.”

“Oh — sorry,” I said.

And he continued walking down the hall, leaving me behind.

My face and neck turn red with embarrassment.

I never tried to speak to him again.

I told that story to my therapist last week, and I felt my eyes well up a little as I told it.

She said it was interesting to ponder the possibilities. What if he’d just been a little bit friendlier to me instead of dismissive? What if I’d been a little braver or forthright?

Maybe nothing would have happened. It was too late in my law school career to change anything. But maybe I would have been able to stop by his office and have a conversation with him. Maybe it would have been just one conversation, but maybe that one conversation would have made my day. Maybe I could have gotten a recommendation letter from him in my subsequent job search.

Instead, he dismissed me like a worthless ant because he had no idea who I was. And I was too intimidated to try again.

I’ve always felt bitter about that.

Just another reason why law school sucked.