Back in the summer of 2010, I was feeling lonely and hopeless.

I guess I was depressed, but I was not desperate or suicidal.  I was just really unhappy.  And it sounds ridiculous and obvious to say, but I was so tired of being unhappy.  I was weary of showing up to my unpaid summer position at a government office that offered no hope for a post-graduation job.  I had to pick my classes and nothing interested me. I had to apply for jobs, but there were virtually none available to apply for.  And the worst part was knowing that I had another year of this ahead of me.

Two years prior to that, I was in my early twenties.  I was happy, healthy had great friends, and a dead-end but stable job in a city I loved.  Fast forward to 2010 and I was in a city I had come to dislike, lonely, gaining weight and run ragged by stress and regret.  I wanted those two years back more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.  I wanted a do-over, a reset button.  For the first time in my life, I just felt old.  I wasn't.  Not exactly, anyway.  But it dawned on me in a way that it never had before that we only get one shot at life, and that I had wasted two years doing something I ended up despising, and was about to waste a third.  I felt that I had squandered the happiness and contentment I had obtained in what I know see was a relatively charmed life after college.

The law school scam-busting blogs have done an immense service by warning people about the risk of attending law school.  But on a selfish level, when I started my blog, it just felt really good to be a part of something productive.  Unhappiness can be so isolating.  Suddenly, when I would write a post, I could check the stats and see that people were reading my thoughts.  Sometimes those people were reading my thoughts at 3:30 in the morning.  It made me feel so much less alone to know that even a few people cared about what I had to say.  And while I am under no illusion that people have been waiting with bated breath, frantically refreshing my blog for months on end in the hopes that I would update again,  I do feel a little bad that I left the readers I had hanging.

I graduated from law school almost 15 months ago.  It took me four months to find a job.  It is a non-legal job, which is what I was looking for.  I am enjoying it, and I feel some of the "spark" coming back.  But the sad truth is that the happier and more active I got, the less I could muster up the energy for blogging.  Not because I no longer held the same opinions, but because I wanted to put the past behind me.  I did not want to let my law school mistake define so much of my life.  But it occurs to me that my experiences with college, school, job hunting and unemployment should be heard.  Not because I am anything special, but because they provide another perspective for people who are contemplating a major personal and financial undertaking. I would be doing a disservice if I never update my readers.  If even one person would benefit from my experiences and forgo law school, I owe it to that person to at least attempt to update with some frequency, if not strict regularity.

I hope that all of my readers are doing well, and I apologize if I have not been terribly responsive to comments or email.  I thought I was better off trying to let go of the past, but you know what they say about that:  Those that fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  Maybe by talking about my own experiences, I will spare someone the pain of repeating my mistakes!

Please do keep in touch!

Rose