zomg i'm almost finished: a freak out

Today I had the sudden realization that I am going to be finished (FINISHED?!) with law school in a month. I mean, I've known that the end was approaching for quite some time. But this was like an out of body realization. *I* am going to be finished with law school? For real? Didn't I just get here? I still sometimes feel surprised that I ended up being a law student in the first place. I don't *feel* like a law student, much less a lawyer. Yet, as swiftly as it began, it is coming to an end. And I can't shake the feeling that I am getting to resume my life, as if it was on pause for a while or something.

The thought of being a working stiff again sends pleasing shivers down my spine. I remember those joyous, carefree days of putting in a good day's work, coming home to our cozy apartment and sitting on the porch with a PBR and a good book. Or maybe T & I would go out for dinner and watch television at a friend's house. On any given weekend, we'd spontaneously drive out on a scenic back road until we hit the mountains. Wait - am I missing life before law school, or Virginia? I seem to have conflated the two.

The reality is that my post-law school life will probably not look similar to my pre-law school life so much as it will be some other unpredictable permutation of "life over the age of 25" (ha!) or "life from 30 on up" as my blog's sub-title should be renamed soon enough. It's not as if I'll magically relocate to our old apartment with the tilted balcony and temperate winters once I've been handed that sweet, sweet JD. We'll still be in the Big City, at least for now. (Although we will hopefully be out of the firetrap, finally.)

But the scariest part of how different things will be once I have my law degree has nothing to do with my lifestyle, per se, or my housing arrangements or where we live. It has to do with work. What will it look like? Will I screw it up? Being a lawyer is much scarier, it seems like, than being a human resources person or whatever you want to call the kind of professional I was before I left for law school. I mean, just to be allowed to do this job, I have to go digging through my past and confess to every little transgression I may or may not have been caught for. (Hello, six stitches on my chin from a bad night out when I was a junior in college. Come on in, various tickets for expired registration! Long time, no see!) Just today I discovered that I owed my college town a bunch of money in property taxes that I had NO IDEA I even had, for a time when I wasn't even living in the municipality. The joys of LexisNexis Public Records searches and nosy bar examiners. Couldn't I just take the pat down?

Ok, I'm rambling. I mean, I just really want to be a good lawyer, and I really want to do this work. To even get to that point, I need to graduate, successfully complete the APPLICATION for the bar, and then, you know, pass the bar. And then I have the rest of my career as a lawyer to be on my best professional behavior - not procrastinate, not forget a date, not mess up my advice, not commit malpractice. I'm just nervous, ok? I can't believe I got this far. I don't want to screw it up