Congrats to the Iowa Law Class of 2020!

I’ve been thinking about endings lately. Or maybe “dwelling” is more apt. It makes sense, given that I graduate from law school in nine days. Only the endings I’m dwelling on seem to multiply and linger, if you will, as new losses emerge daily.

I cry on my drive from Newton to Iowa City nearly every time, remembering that my three best law school friends—the people who made my beloved college town a home—aren’t there anymore.

I cried as I cleaned out my carrel, the unlit law library shielding my tears from view (as if there was anyone else around to see them). Staring into the dull, reflective plastic of my carrel lockbox for one last selfie, I saw a different person, three years later: one who got good grades and bad ones (looking at you, Trusts & Estates), one who wrote a whole Supreme Court opinion, one who had gotten into and (almost) graduated from a university she’d loved her whole life, one who found her calling as a future public defender.

The books from my carrel are still in my trunk, strewn about. I haven’t summoned the strength to bring them up the stairs into my apartment. Somehow, I think putting them in a neat stack would only do a disservice to this chaos in which I end my law school career and earn my J.D.

My beloved carrel blanket lays over some of them as if trying to shield me from some of the heartbreak of this ending, the way it all happened. Continue reading →

Big 3L mood.

Lately I’ve been running without routes, without a time goal, without mileage in mind. After two years of fitting, well, life, into increasingly nonexistent pockets of free time, I’ve been rediscovering a sense of aimlessness. A couple times a week, I don’t set an alarm in the morning; class doesn’t start until 2 p.m., after all. I get home from school and run and run and run, the setting sun my only (extremely rough) estimate as to what time it is.

3L is more uncomfortable, more jarring than I had anticipated. The public interest jobs I plan to apply for won’t open until next semester. Many won’t hire me until I (hopefully) pass the bar next July.

It is a strange sense of limbo, like senior year of high school and college but worse.

A new lease agreement arrived in my mailbox the other day, asking if I’ll be living in this delightfully creaky 90-year-old stone house for a fourth year. I won’t. But I’m not sure where I’ll be, which, cool cool cool. Continue reading →

Big spring mood.

Three-ish inches of ice encircled every route away from my apartment building for months, turning the walk to school into a series of little and big leaps as I hoped with each one I’d land on dry ground. Finally, the ice was melting, water and warmth carving away at a winter that just wouldn’t let go.

My copy of Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy” album had arrived in the mail when I got home from school. I remembered when I bought Jesse McCartney’s “Beautiful Soul” album in 2004, unwrapping Cardi’s CD with similar enthusiasm 15 years later.

I cried as I opened the envelope, peeled away the plastic wrap, realizing that it had been so long since I’d had a good day, a good week, a good month. Realizing that I deserve to have good days at all.

I remember one day this semester, maybe in week four or week six or week seven, I unlocked my door, threw my backpack on the couch and collapsed in the entryway, crying over nothing and everything, all at once. I have cried in my carrel, on the Ped Mall, on the Cambus (but shoutout to the Wednesday night Blue Route driver for playing nothing but Kesha). Continue reading →

This year I have been working on belonging to myself first and foremost.

After my birthday in November through most of January, I had trouble writing anything creative. I would start a blog post, write 100 words, then put it to rest in my journal, a haphazard collection of unpublishable ramblings and unfinished personal essays.

That’s about the point that I stopped belonging to myself and started belonging instead to law school stress, to a relationship that ultimately let me down, to the never-ending docket of 2L obligations. Over three straight snow days in January spent solely with myself, I discovered that belonging to yourself is an active process. Continue reading →

The tree outside my house becomes more autumnal by the day, and I just love it.

I have a good memory for the wrong things. I can never remember if my Advanced Legal Research class is at 12:20 or 12:40 on Mondays. I remember every word of long-deleted texts from men who no longer matter to me — or, more aptly, shouldn’t matter to me anymore.

I forget my lunch as I walk out of my apartment again, sprinting up the creaky, wooden stairs of my building to retrieve it before I’m late to Con Law II. Sometimes I run specific routes on purpose, remembering problems I ran away from, traumas I could only contend with knowing the pavement wouldn’t crumble under me, that it would hold me up and push me forward.

Friends and family have long said I have a good memory. I wonder what that means.

I can tell you all my friends’ birthdays off the top of my head; I don’t need a calendar alert.

I forget to wash fruit before I eat it all the time. Sorry, Mom.

Someone always has to remind me to grab my to-go box as I leave the restaurant. Continue reading →

I always say I’m going to write more in the summer, as if the heat and light could coax the right words into existence, lifting them into the unwavering humidity where they’d hover long enough that I could write them down. Summer evaporated, as usual, with happy hours and crop tops and long runs.

It didn’t happen, of course, as I finished my first legal internship, studied for the MPRE and explored my *technically speaking* home state of Minnesota. I waited for the right words, wondered where they’d gone, if they were ever really there at all.

My journal from 1L year is 4,454 words and reads like a frenetic plea for help, a cacophony of all-caps crises, italicized epiphanies and wine-fueled run-on sentences. Did I run out of words?

I was unusually one with nature in Minnesota this summer.

I thought a lot about home this summer, the way it can exist in multiple places at once. The way that people I met over the summer are a big reason it ever felt like home. The way that sunrises and sunsets seem to linger longer when a place becomes home, the way the pinks and oranges and yellows cling to imaginary folds in the sky, staining it with color just before I fall asleep. Continue reading →