Shortly after deciding to leave law school, I had been working different jobs and floundering through life, trying to figure out what was next. My whole life had been geared toward one goal: become a lawyer. If you ask any of my family and closest friends, my role model in my life, and the person I looked up to most, was my older cousin, who was like a sister to me. She was a lawyer so of course I wanted to be a lawyer. When I realized the life of a lawyer wasn’t for me, it was my cousin that supported me and made me feel like it was okay. She said it was better to know and be confident in my decision to leave now than to finish and hate my job later and also be hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. She knew, being a lawyer herself, how grueling the hours could be … and she also knew being a first time mom, the struggle of work/life balance. I didn’t know it at the time, but we would come to have many conversations about this once I became a mom myself.
