Yesterday a friend of mine posted on Facebook about that it had been 19 years since Princess Diana was killed. Nineteen years I thought. Where have those years gone?

The night of Princess Diana’s death began like many Saturday nights that summer: I was at home in my Alexandria, Virginia apartment studying for the LSAT, which I was planning to take that fall. Around 11:00 or midnight, I decided to take a break and I flipped on CNN only to discover that the People’s Princess had been in a fatal car crash in Paris. Needless to say, I never resumed studying that night and probably never even made it to bed.

I’d wanted to be a lawyer for as long as I could remember. The entire reason I moved to Washington, D.C. after college was to pursue my passion of politics and to enter the legal world. Ya, I was pretty much a nerd. I still am. In 1997, I’d been a paralegal for four years, three years past when I’d initially planned to go to law school. I loved the work I did as a paralegal because I worked on interesting civil litigation cases and periodically cite checked briefs headed for the Supreme Court. I loved being able to dig into legal research and find evidence and legal precedent to back up our arguments and I was finally ready to put that passion into action as a lawyer.

A few weeks after Princess Diana’s death I took the LSATs and my life changed forever.

In the middle of the test, I had a panic attack. My chest started pounding and felt like it was trying to break out of my body. I couldn’t breath. I was sweating profusely. And I didn’t know how to stop it. Today I know how to bring myself out of a panic attack, but at 26, I didn’t have a clue because I’d only had one or two panic attacks and it didn’t occur to me that there was a way cut them short or even prevent them when I realized one was coming.

I went home from the test feeling defeated. I’d spent the entire summer studying, even during my week at Watervale. I’d taken countless practice exams. I’d taken the Kaplan test prep class. This was the moment I’d prepared for for months and years and I’d blown it. I knew that with my score from that day I would never be accepted to law school, so I did the only thing I could think of: I cancelled my test score. This meant that my test wasn’t scored and there was no record of me having taken it. The good news was that when I was ready, I could take it a second time and no one would see what I could only imagine was the worst score in history.

Ultimately, I never became a lawyer. Not because I stopped loving the law or even because I choked so badly on the LSAT. I never became a lawyer because, after the test, I began paying close attention to the lawyers I worked with and the lives they were living. I saw them all working 80 plus hours a week at a huge corporate firm, and although they earned enough money to pay off their law school debt and still live quite comfortably, many of them had very little life outside of the firm.

Many of my lawyer friends were unable to sustain relationships, put their kids to bed over the phone and read them stories from the duplicate copies of Little Golden Books they kept in their desks, and worked through their vacations, if they took them at all.

That wasn’t the life I wanted. Sheryl Sandberg would say that I leaned out at that point because I gave up a career I’d wanted my entire life for a family I wasn’t even close to having (and that has never materialized). I would say that I was already working insane hours and simply decided that I didn’t want that to be my entire life.

As I reflected on the 19 years since Princess Diana’s death yesterday, I began to wonder what my life would be like if I hadn’t given up on my dream. Would I have stayed in Washington and never moved back to Chicago? Would I be a partner or a judge now? Would I have gone on to pursue a career as a social justice lawyer? Would I have met my husband in law school and gone on to have children with him?

I don’t know any of the answers to those questions, but if I had it to do all over again, I’d have fought through my panic attacks, put aside my fears, taken the LSAT again, and become a lawyer.

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This post is part of ChicagoNow‘s monthly Blogapalooza exercise where Community Manager, Jimmy Greenfield, emails all ChicagoNow bloggers a topic at 9:00 p.m. and we have one hour to write and publish our post. Tonight’s topic was:

“Write about something in your life you’d like a second chance at.”

To read all of the posts written by ChicagoNow bloggers on this topic, click here.

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