You're a Blank. You Can't Do That.

I've heard it more times than I can count. You're a lawyer. You can't do that.

The colors on my website looked like a cosmetics company. My logo was three intersecting kites. I met estate planning clients at the YMCA and held consultations over Skype. I named my law firm Vujade Law — to see law from a fresh perspective — and not a single scale of justice appeared anywhere on my branding.

You're a lawyer. You can't do that.

I went to law school at 32 because men kept walking into rooms and taking credit for my work. Someone told me I needed a law degree to stop it. I said fine, I'll go get one. Three years later I passed the bar, picked up an LLM in taxation on the side because I'd figured out that death and taxes weren't going anywhere, and then Kip was born two weeks after my last final exam and everything changed again.

I didn't go work in a skyscraper. I built a virtual law office — one of the first in the country — and I just started being me.

The Grand Rapids Business Journal put me on the cover. I was invited to teach law students how to do law differently. My silly little virtual law firm was, as it turns out, pretty significant.

But that's not the part I wanted to tell you about.

In 2015, I was running webinars — teaching people the legal infrastructure they needed for their digital business, wrapped in a concept I called Easy as PB&J because nobody wants to hear about trademark law at face value. And a woman who had been championing me, telling me I was great, inviting me into her spaces — she showed up in the middle of one of my webinars and absolutely lost it. You can't do this. This is what I do. You can't do this.

She dumped me from her groups. Blocked me. Went quiet.

And I had two reactions, the way I always do. One was: watch me. I wrote the book. Published it in September 2016, ninety days after someone told me I couldn't.

The other reaction was quieter and it took longer to heal. I started second-guessing every post. Can I say this? Is she going to come after me? What did I do wrong?

Here's what I know now that I couldn't articulate then: she wasn't threatened by what I was doing. She was triggered by something I reflected back at her. Confident people don't tear others down. Settled people don't need to. Whatever she was protecting — that was hers, not mine. She tried to make it my fault. It wasn't.

I'm a lawyer. I'm a mother. I'm a creative problem solver. I can do anything I want to do.

So can you.

Whatever blank fills your sentence — whatever label someone has used to tell you that you're limited — I want you to hear this: the people who say you can't are telling you about themselves. Not about you.

Go do the thing. There are no wrong turns.

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