There should be a specific word for the kind of frustration that goes beyond just irritated annoyance, the kind that sinks into your soul and makes your blood slowly but surely boil, and makes you think it might be acceptable to pack up your stuff and run away to the mountains, quickly before anyone notices you’ve gone before school started. This specific kind of frustration only occurs when trying to understand the rules of cribbage or financial aid.

I haven’t done this in 6 years. I’m a non-traditional law student (although I think that might be a misnomer since I am just as lost and confused as to what I’m doing with my life as any traditional law student.) I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in 2012, a lifetime of mundane semi-adult days away.

Back then I muddled my way through financial aid forms blissfully unaware of how those impossibly large figures of surely imaginary quantity listed on the paper would affect my future day to day life. After graduation I initially crashed and burned–culminating in a rock-bottom memory of my credit card being declined in line at Target with two carts full of decidedly unnecessary but beautifully shabby chic home decorating junk. Years of being in the real world later and I’ve transformed into the boring friend who insists on accurately splitting checks, who does monthly Excel budget spreadsheets, who carries cash envelopes and is known for excellent money planning. But even that seems like a memory as I sit here, having been reduced to tearing my hair out in the common computer area at my local library while staring at this supposed financial aid.

Due to the above story, a larger-than-life credit card bill and undergraduate loans from the sometimes most expensive city school in the country, nameless it will remain, I’m scrounging for every cent. Which is particularly frustrating because I picked this school, in a depressingly adult fashion, simply because of its sticker price and its 100% tuition scholarship offer.  I was waitlisted to other schools, but I was squarely far above my dream school’s medians (thanks Trump Bump) and could have crafted a better application/applied earlier next year had I thought I had any chance at graduating with less than $100,000 in debt. I did not. So the craptastic local school with the free class and the possibility (horror) of saving money living at home would have to do. I am more than bitter about this, I am quietly and maddeningly livid. This will likely be the focus of my blog. We will come back to this.

But for now, financial aid, or lack thereof. I understand that there might be fraud if students were given money before school started. I understand situations change and you’re not really enrolled until you’re enrolled. But I’ve already given up hopes and dreams of rising above my means by settling for this school. I’ve already become hopelessly depressed contemplating those estimated housing cost numbers, realizing my budget may mean I will be sleeping contained by my childhood bedroom walls for the next three years. Do I really have to have the indignity of putting off buying a backpack, pens, notebooks, a printer, a computer, potentially textbooks, until a week after school starts? What do you want me to carry my books I should probably sell plasma to get, a paper bag? The assumption in this country that you must have money to make money is insidious and destructive. It is defeating. Besides the many, many, MANY other qualms I have about starting law school, the utter lack of financial support I already feel, is disheartening and robbing me of any potential excitement I might have at trading three years of misery for a slightly higher chance of earning a living wage and not much more.