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Abigail Seymour tells PEOPLE it’s never too late to chase your dreams
NEED TO KNOW
- Abigail Seymour, who grew up in New York, moved to Spain from 1994 to 1997, where she underwent a transformational journey
- At 47, she enrolled in law school after a career in photography despite initial doubts
- Seymour now runs her own bilingual law firm, Camino Law, focused on family law and supporting women in her community
Abigail Seymour has always been one to chase her dreams.
Seymour attended film school at New York University, where she graduated with a degree in photography. While she got married and then divorced a few years later, in 1994, she moved to Spain to teach English.
“It was like this sense of wanting to adventure. I was 25 or 26, and I felt like I had a chance to try again. That set me off on that acceptance of renewal,” Seymour, now 59, shares.
In 1996, she walked the Camino Francés, the 485-mile route on the Camino de Santiago.
“I met a guy at a party in Madrid, and he was super nice, and he wore a bow tie. Six months later, I met him again, and he looked completely different. I said, ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘I walked across Spain,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, whatever transformed him, I want that same transformation.’ “
“I was very drawn to it for that reason. When I walked it, somebody said, ‘If somebody else walks it because you did, then you’ve done your job.’ ”
She decided to make the 28-day trek on her own, starting in Roncesvalles, near the border between France and Spain, and ending in Santiago de Compostela.
“I had really never considered going with anyone else. I somehow just knew it was something you could do, and that you would find friends along the way,” Seymour shares. “So there was a sense of really surrendering to the process by going. It was a sense of being okay with being with myself, all day long, and being alone. Then, allowing the journey to take over.”
As predicted, Seymour met fellow travelers along the trail — some of whom she is still friends with today.
“I made it to the end, and it was, in some ways, a little bit anticlimactic because I still felt when I got back to Madrid, I still felt a longing for the journey,” Seymour shares. “It wasn’t really a destination. It was just that what I didn’t know was that I had found the strength that I was gonna need later.”
After the journey, Seymour moved back to the United States and settled in North Carolina in 1997. There, she married, had two kids, and started a photography business, but admits that it never felt like her “true work.”
“I was always aware, as I was aging, there’s gonna be a clock on this one because I’m gone every weekend. I’m traveling all over the state. I’m driving home late at night. My eyes are getting bad. I couldn’t do it forever,” Seymour shares.
That’s when she saw a sign — literally.
“We had just built a law school in my town called Elon Law, and it was built in 2006. I would drive past it and think, ‘Oh my God, it’s right there,’” Seymour shares. “I even thought about, ‘Well, maybe I’ll write a book about lawyers,’ and I’d go down and shadow people in the courthouse. I wanted to be doing what they were doing rather than watching it. I was looking for something to be my next career after photography.”
When she was younger, Seymour had contemplated being a lawyer, but never thought she would be able to pass the bar.
However, her mindset shifted after she walked the Camino, and this time around, she had faith she would be able to handle anything she put her mind to.
“People encouraged me,” she says. “It didn’t take much, but I was working at a nonprofit while winding down my photography business. I started working for an immigration attorney, helping her, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to be an attorney.’ She said, ‘You should do it.’ “
While Seymour thought she was “too old” to start a new career, she admits it “didn’t take that much to convince me to try.”
“It was like a touchstone that kept coming back around, because I resonated so much with that woman when I started helping her in her office,” she shares. “It really called to me, and at that point, it all started to converge because I was bilingual. I was working in a nonprofit helping immigrants. I was working with an immigration lawyer. I was like, ‘You mean I could reach my hand out, and I could be a lawyer in three years?’ ”
While milling it over with loved ones, one response stuck with her: “You can change, right?”
“The most obvious thing that anybody could ever say, but it had not occurred to me that I could actually be different or just change. It shifted for me,” Seymour shares. “I was like, yeah, maybe I could be a person who doesn’t do that, or could be a person who does these things. It was a huge shift in how I saw myself.”
So, at 47, Seymour enrolled in law school.
“I loved law school. I loved the stories. The thought of being part of this tradition was very exciting to me, too,” Seymour shares.
However, during her first year, her sister died, and she admittedly “almost dropped out” while dealing with grief.
“I feel like I slacked on some things. Right after my sister died, I was in a class, and I hadn’t done the reading. When they called on me, I just said, ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t get a chance to read it.’ The teacher goes, ‘No problem. It’s your career.’ In front of the class,” she recalls. “I still have a resentment against him, but he was right. That part of it and just keeping up and comparing myself to others and the competitiveness, those parts were hard.”
On top of that, she notes that her “kids were little, and I was balancing motherhood.”
“I did feel very old. Everybody there was 20,” she says. “That was a challenge, but they never made me feel like that. They were lovely. That was all in my head. It was rigorous. I welcomed the rigor. I don’t wanna go back, don’t get me wrong. I don’t wanna study for any more bar exams. But there was community.”
One of the things that kept her going was that she simply didn’t want “to have to tell anybody that I had flopped out or that I’d failed or that I’d quit.”
“I didn’t feel like that was an easy conversation. I really did look for ways to quit along the way,” she admits. “After my sister died, I went to the Dean, and I was like, ‘This terrible thing has happened, and I don’t know if I can focus, and I don’t know if I should stay.’ I still thank him for this to this day because he said, ‘You did the hardest part already. You might as well stay.’ ”
Seymour took the bar and failed it twice. After the second failed attempt, she went to her therapist looking for comfort, expecting him to tell her it would be okay if she quit and that she should take time for herself.
Instead, he said, “Everything you want is on the other side of comfort.”
Deep down, Seymour knew he was right, telling herself, “If I don’t do this, I will feel horrible. I will be sad all the time.”
On her third attempt, Seymour passed the bar.
“I still get excited to say that I’m an officer of the court. I still get excited, and I’m proud to say I’m an attorney,” Seymour tells PEOPLE. “It was hard enough to get that, [but] it was really worth getting.”
After passing the bar, Seymour worked at a law firm for almost eight months before deciding to start her own firm, which would ultimately become Camino Law.
“We have seven employees, all women. We do family law. We’re bilingual,” she shares. “It’s being able to take something that was pretty true, the law is the law, you can’t reinterpret that, but you can change how you practice it. The experience of that is different. That’s what I saw missing, particularly in family law and in law that serves women.”
Years into owning her own firm, Seymour says it’s exactly what she “wanted to create.”
“I’m very proud to have created something that didn’t exist before. People told me when I first went to law school, ‘You’re gonna have a hard time finding a job, the job market’s tight.’ There’s something satisfying in saying, ‘I found a job, and I created one for seven other people,’” she shares. “There’s a real pride in that. Having a space where other people can celebrate it with me is really fun. People who work here have been here since the beginning, when it was just a chair, a desk and a phone. It’s been really fun to be creating something with other people.”
When looking back on her life, she shares, “I was so lucky I got to give birth to a child. I got to adopt a child. I got to go to law school. I’ve gotten to do all these things. I don’t feel that same desire to ‘let me try something else.’ This feels like where I was supposed to be.”
Read the original article on People
