Back to The Defiant Few ←INSIDE MY HEAD · WEDNESDAY · DF027
I Became a Lawyer. I Never Got to Become the Lawyer I Might Have Been.
Passing the bar proved Parkinson’s had not stopped me; it did not mean the career I fought for would become the career I imagined.
A law degree is an expensive way to discover that achievement and arrival are not the same thing.
I was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s during my second year of law school in 1996. I earned my law degree in 1998 and passed the bar in 1999. Those facts fit beautifully into the kind of story people like to tell about adversity: disease arrived, I refused to surrender, and determination carried me across the finish line.