I got my diploma in the mail today.

It's official. I have earned a Master of Science in Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Five years ago I left a stable job and a comfortable life to go back to school. I decided that I hated being a lawyer, and I wanted to do something different with my life. To afford this, I moved in with my parents, and took only a part-time job so I could devote appropriate time to my degree. It should have taken three years at most.

Not too long after I started that part-time job with the non-profit, it ran out of money for my position. Since then I've only had intermittant per diem employment with a few law offices doing what I hate most: practicing law. Often I go for months without work or income.

I had a mental breakdown about two years ago. The stress from all points of my life finally killed me. I went for therapy and medication, and really spent most of my days crying and hating myself.

That mental breakdown put me behind in finishing my thesis. I had a major panic attack when the deadline for submission came and I hadn't even started the thesis. I figured at that point that I had completely torpedoed any chance of getting the degree and that I had wasted three years for nothing and than I'd never amount to anything in my life.

I actually did lots of things to sabatoge my degree. Aside from the thesis, I had one class in which I turned in my final project long after the class ended, but barely in time for my professor to grudgingly do a rush job grading it and change my grade. Though that professor hated me forever after. I had another class in which I just simply didn't do the final paper at all, period. I used a final paper for another class to give a harsh professional and personal criticism to the T.A. who graded the paper. I repeatedly challenged the entire institute as being blind to and inadequate in addressing domestic conflicts (the whole program being geared toward conflict in other countries, and excluding some domestic conflicts from consideration by definition). I missed deadlines to turn in simple paperwork to keep me in the program.

As with so many things in my life, I acheived final success through unexpected and undeserved blind luck. That started with the random assignment of advisor to me. I happened to get that professor that all the students love- smart, laid back, loves teaching, loves to help, really cares. When I decided to give up after being unable to finish the thesis, he wouldn't let me, and did the administrative work to withdraw me from the thesis and let me instead finish out with directed reading credits. He understood what I was thinking about domestic conflicts- violence against women being my focus- and encouraged me to keep pursuing it and convince my professors one by one that it belonged as a focus of study within the program. (And often I was able to convince my professors to stop thinking of violence against women as interpersonal conflict and start thinking of it as social conflict.) Though it wasn't the job of the institute's secretary to remind me of deadlines, she did anyway, and went out of her way to get things done for me even after I was far too late. Several class grades I think could have rightfully been Fs weren't Fs. Whenever I had to do a dreaded group project, I always somehow found the groups in which everyone was smart and motivated. With it all done, I ended up with a 3.82 GPA, two professors pushing me to publish two things I wrote, an an invitation to go to Oxford in the Fall. (And I'd love to take advantage of the latter, but I don't know if it's feasible.)

Right now, there's no way I can view my life with anything but optimism. After my mental breakdown, and after trying different medications, my physiciatrist started treating me for Attention Deficit Disorder (something that other doctors I had seen said I couldn't have, despite having the symptoms, because it wasn't diagnosed in my childhood). Adderall has given me back my mental capacities and my ability to be a happy person. Even though I haven't worked much in the