AITA for being bitter about my best friend getting into law school?

My best friend (19F) of some five years and I (18F) both got into law school, but there are some differences. Long Post Ahead.

Look, I hate for this to come across as braggadocious, but I was always the higher achiever when it came to pretty much everything we did together. Public speaking, debating, poetry-- things her parents wanted her to do, and things I had to fight tooth and nail to keep up with. The people I lived with when we met in middle school were incredibly abusive; school stuff was like, my respite from that reality. I was all in with everything I did-- so I just did better than her. It was never a big deal with us. She was worse academically than she was at extracurriculars, and she was never shy about asking for help with assignments or what have you. I've literally written some of her term papers. It was just a given.

When we got our predictions for our final results, I was predicted to the place somewhere in the 1-2 percentiles, and she was around the 9-10 mark. Keep in mind that the "percentiles" only go up to 25, so their ranges get exponentially larger etc, and what I'm basically saying is... a 9-10 OP is uh. Not particularly great? Like you'd never expect someone with that score to even think about studying law. Plus, she moved to a really swanky private school, which thanks to our shitty state education system means her result actually got boosted a rank or two, while all us inner-city public school kids had ours knocked down, because of your school's overall performance factoring into your final individual score. It's terrible, classist, and they're changing it this year.

Anyway. We got our first predictions in the 11th grade, but halfway through the year, I became really, really depressed. Like it knocked me out of school levels of depressed. Had to get hospitalized levels of depressed. Diagnosed with PTSD (remember the abusive relatives?) levels of depressed. I'd recuperated enough to go back in year 12, but it was pointless then. I wouldn't be able to graduate with a high school certificate anymore because of the 10-month break, and I couldn't bear repeating a grade-- I just couldn't. I quit school and enrolled for a full-time diploma. I studied my ass off for this big SAT type exam for professionals looking to get back into school.

In the meantime, My friend had gotten into my first choice university, in their arts and international relations program. I was really happy for her. She's an incredibly empathetic person, and diplomacy is something I thought she'd have a natural knack for. Still, halfway through last year, when I'd done well enough on the entrance exam to scrape together a third percentile result (not enough to get into the best law school in the state, but good enough for the second best), she said she was going to do law too (in my first choice uni too, no less) and that she was so excited for us to be study buddies, I was dumbfounded.

I'm not proud of this, but I went home that day and I researched the absolute fuck out of the degree-changing process at that uni, and what I found out made me so, goddamn, mad. Turns out, you can switch to law at that uni from any of their humanities-based majors as long as you had a GPA of 5.0 or above-- but for outsiders, you needed to have a perfect 7.0. Scream. The elitism is almost too much to bear. God. This. This is why Australia has such an oversaturated job market for lawyers. God. I'm going to have to work my ass off for my first year for that perfect score, just to transfer into a law school that's as good as hers.

Look, I know her, and I know that she had to work her ass off for that 5.0 and above. I would never be passive-aggressive with her about this, of course-- she's a wonderful person whom I love, and she absolutely doesn't deserve to face the brunt of my frustrations but it's just... so hard not to be bitter. She's so happy about this opportunity, and yet every time she talks about how we're "law school bitches" I wanna scream. It just feels so unfair.

Submitted January 12, 2019 at 05:27AM by loverletters http://bit.ly/2AHhnyV