1 My thoughts and faults

As I sat down for the first class of my last year in law school, it hit me in an instant that I was only a few months away from not being sheltered and having to face the real world properly alone. I took a deep breath as the people around me took their seats. I was anxious, but I didn't know why.

The professor came into the room and began teaching as if we hadn't even been gone. It wasn't like high school. He didn't care who was in class or how we were doing. He just taught because that's what he had come to do, and I just stared because I wasn't sure what I was doing there. The people around me had books and pens, spare pens at the ready, cups of coffee, and were all jotting down things the professor said. I had no idea what they were writing because nothing he said made sense. All I could do was look around, feeling like a confused fool with nothing to do.

I managed to gather myself after about five minutes of curiously staring at my classmates and finally pulled out a notebook. I took a sip of coffee to help me concentrate because the law is tough to understand without proper concentration. I wrote down the date and the topic of the lecture and paid full attention to the professor. This only lasted for a short time though, because just as fast as I got into it, my mind drifted away deep into completely irrelevant thoughts.

It's a problem I've had since I was young. I can never seem to concentrate on what I need to and can never remember what is important. My mind is so full of miscellaneous thoughts that there seems to be no space for useful ones. It was the reason for my bad grades in middle school and the biggest disappointment to the people around me. I had always thought it was because I had a creative mind and just never got the chance to explore it, but the people around me notioned otherwise. To them, I was no Picasso my thoughts were all useless memories of articles and fantasies, unworthy to be heard or listened to. Yet here I am, the girl with stupid thoughts in a law school, in one of the epicenters of education. In this world, my thoughts are my greatest comfort and chiefly resented detraction.