On the other side and alive!

First year is in the books. Thank goodness. As you can tell from my lack of blogging, life and school got busy and I rarely had time to update. I want to get better though because I have so many things to say. Now that I am on the other side of the first year of law school, I will reflect a little bit. The first semester was pretty awful. I didn't realize how much I needed my family until they were no longer around. It hit me somewhere around the middle of the semester that I have lived 45 minutes away from my mom or dad my whole life. Then, I found myself 4.5-6 hours away from anyone I knew before law school. My relationship worked out well for the first semester, then things seemed to fall apart the second, but we will get to that later. Long story short, first semester was lonely and somewhat sad. I found it difficult to make good friends and the ones I did make had their own lives and their own responsibilities that left very little time for fun "girl time" etc. Not to mention, law school is tough without friends to push you along and help you along when you don't understand a concept or reading. My stepfather passed away on Thanksgiving in Mexico and it took it's emotional toll. I felt torn if I would have time to prepare the way I should for exams but I pushed and did it anyway. In retrospect, I should have taken a little more time for grieving, because I think it made my first week of exams not as strong as they could have been. Then something magical (haha...ok not magical, but definitely a change for the better) happened during finals when I started studying with Liz and Ashley. Right away, we realized that we had a ton to talk about even though we barely knew each other. We spent more time getting to know each other than studying. Don't worry, we all still did reasonably well on our exams (even though we didn't know it walking out of the tests).

I spent winter break hanging out with family, doing the divorced family dance between Virginia and North Carolina. I spent time with Jon and we had some good times and some bad ones, just didn't quite seem the same as it was in August but we were determined and tried to make the best of things and made up after fights etc. We recommitted to making our relationship work. I was excited to go back to Morgantown, ready to start a new semester and give this whole law school thing a second go.

The second semester classes sucked. There is no way around that. All except Property, which was by far my favorite class the first year. It was practical, applicable, and my work at Vanguard seemed to give me some background. Something that I didn't have for any of the other classes I took. Not to mention, I had a first year professor that was both excited to be there and very encouraging. She made a big difference for me and for many of my classmates. The rest of the classes, meh. Especially Con Law. Yuck. Seriously...yuck. Long story short, I haven't gotten grades back on 4/5 classes and I don't really want them. I know lots of people don't feel that way but ignorance is bliss and I felt like I had been hit by a mac truck after several of the exams. It's really a frustrating feeling to feel like you get the class then sit in a 5 hour exam and thing to yourself, what the hell is this. You just hope that everyone else is asking themselves the same thing.

Ok, social. Second semester was sooo much better. I became best friends with Liz and Ashley and they pretty much know everything about me. These girls are wonderful and I feel so blessed to have them in my life. Turns out, you get to see everyone's true colors second semester because they are no longer trying to impress. That was a good and bad thing, depending on the person. My relationship w/ Jon seemed to fall apart at the seams. I have a lot of guilt over that, thinking that maybe if I wouldn't have left Charlotte, things would have worked out and there wouldn't have been the problems there ultimately were. Of course, no one will ever know if that's the case or not.

I am back in Charlotte for the summer because I wanted to spend some time with mom. I don't like her being all alone. I am working at the courthouse and that starts Monday. I really don't want to be back in North Carolina, which is just a pain in the butt because I worked so hard to find something over the summer down here. I would have honestly preferred staying in West Virginia at this point. I guess that's life. I will have time this summer to update more....it's been a wind-whirl year.