Barely two days after it started, my service as a juror for Cuyahoga County has ended. And by ‘service’ I mean working from the juror waiting room and watching juror selection, having not actually been on a case.

I’m relieved that this will make it that much easier to get back to my usual routine — I could use any help I can get — but I’m also bummed I didn’t get to participate in the system for real. I’m dying to know what it’s like. What real attorneys are like, how an expert witness engages with their audiences, how the one particularly casual judge I met would have handled the proceedings.

For me, just being who I am, with my general shyness and poor verbal comprehension skills, it would have been monumentally difficult to listen to days of testimony and process it and then feel comfortable discussing it with a bunch of people I’d never met.

I was looking forward to that challenge. I felt like that was a challenge I needed to overcome.

But if this needs to happen, it needs to happen, and there are, of course, many ways of getting challenges to come my way that don’t involve waiting two years for another summons to appear in my mailbox.