Why I Almost Didn’t Go Back — And Why I Did

There was a version of me that didn’t go to law school.

She existed for about six months after the surgery. She was tired and scared and seriously reconsidering every plan she’d ever made. She looked at the LSAT prep books on her shelf and thought — maybe not. Maybe this is the universe telling me to slow down. Maybe I should take this as a sign and choose something smaller, something safer, something that doesn’t require me to be sharp and relentless and fully present every single day.

I understood that version of me. I don’t judge her at all.

But I couldn’t stay her.

Here’s the thing about having your timeline ripped away from you: it either breaks your relationship with ambition or it clarifies it. For me it clarified it. Completely and uncomfortably. Because when you’re lying in a hospital bed wondering what your life is going to look like, you find out very quickly what you actually want. The noise falls away. The shoulds and the supposed-tos and the what-will-people-thinks — all of it goes quiet. And what’s left is just the truth.

I wanted to be a lawyer.

Not because of the prestige or the salary or any of the reasons people give when they’re explaining their choices to other people. Because I am genuinely, constitutionally built for it. I like arguments. I like precision. I like the idea of walking into a room and being the most prepared person in it. I like advocating for people who don’t have the words or the platform to advocate for themselves.

I mean business. I always have. The aneurysms didn’t change that — if anything, they made it louder.

So I went back. Later than I planned, on a timeline that made some people raise their eyebrows, in a body that was still healing and a mind that was still processing. I sat in a classroom six months after brain surgery and I took notes and I raised my hand and I did not let the hard thing I’d survived become the reason I stopped reaching for the hard things I wanted.

That is not a heroic story. I want to be clear about that. It doesn’t feel heroic from the inside. It feels like stubbornness, mostly. Like deciding that the plan still stands even when the circumstances don’t cooperate. Like refusing to let the worst season of your life write the final chapter.

She means business is the collection my dad named after me and I cried when he told me. Not because it was flattering — though it was — but because it was accurate. Because someone who loves me looked at everything I’d been through and the thing he wanted to put on a shirt wasn’t about the struggle. It was about who I am underneath it.

That’s the woman this collection is for.

Not the woman who has it all figured out. The woman who decided to keep figuring it out anyway. The one who’s one semester from done, one brief away from filed, one meeting away from the decision that changes everything. The one who’s been told — directly or indirectly, by circumstances or by people — that maybe she should scale back.

She didn’t scale back. She leveled up.

This one’s for her. For us. For every woman who means business even when — especially when — the business of her life got complicated.