The Weight of Truth
The air in the Daley Center in downtown Chicago always smells the same: floor wax, stale coffee, and anxiety. It’s a peculiar combination that settles in your nostrils and stays there, clinging to your clothes long after you’ve left the building. It was a Tuesday in November, the kind of gray, biting cold day where the wind cuts right through your coat no matter how many layers you’re wearing, turning your fingers numb and your cheeks raw.

The meteorologist on WGN had called it “lake-effect misery,” and for once, the hyperbole felt accurate. But despite the cold outside, I was sweating. Not the dignified kind of perspiration you might experience after a workout, but the clammy, sick kind that comes from pure terror.

I stood outside the heavy oak doors of Courtroom 402, my back pressed against the cold plaster wall that had been painted institutional beige sometime in the previous century. My hands were shaking so badly I had to tuck them into my armpits just to stop the visual tremor, worried that anyone passing by would see my weakness, my fear, my complete and utter lack of composure. I was thirty-two years old, had a bachelor’s degree in accounting that I’d worked three jobs to pay for, and had survived the death of my mother just three years prior.

But in that hallway, waiting for the bailiff to call my name, I felt like I was seven again. Small. Helpless.

Invisible. Waiting for the yelling to start, for the inevitable moment when I would be told, once again, that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t worth the oxygen I was breathing. The hallway was busy with the usual Tuesday morning crowd.

Lawyers in expensive suits strode past with the confidence of people who knew exactly where they belonged. A young couple sat on the bench across from me, clutching each other’s hands, their faces etched with worry about whatever family matter had brought them here. An older gentleman in a security uniform pushed a mail cart, whistling tunelessly.

Life moved around me while I stood frozen, a statue made of fear and desperation. I had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in my head. I’d practiced my opening statement in the mirror of my studio apartment bathroom, the one with the cracked tile and the faucet that dripped no matter how tightly you turned it.