When I was 12, I was shut for a week inside the windowless shed behind our house, my family's order clear: do not come out. The shed reeked of dust and old wood. The floor was unforgivingly cold, and I blasted the space heater all night to stay warm. By day, I could hear the birds chirping through the roof and the soft ringing of bells as my mom prayed inside the house I had been kicked out of. Sometimes, I would hear children laughing and shouting from the nearby school playground, or the occasional footsteps and distant, pitying voices of my dad and brother asking if I needed food.

This was my introduction to chaupadi, the traditional Nepalese practice of isolating menstruating girls due to their perceived impurity. Although the Supreme Court of Nepal banned chaupadi in 2005, years before my first period, many families, like mine, continued it in secret. Even today, in parts of western Nepal, upwards of 80% of young girls are forced to endure chaupadi. When I questioned my mother about why I was forced to sleep alone in a shed while my brother and father continued to enjoy the comforts of our family home, she simply pointed to the pictures of our Nepalese deities on the wall. These were the women we were supposedly honoring by participating in chaupadi. I was struck by the hypocrisy: how could the female be divine, deserving of the highest honor, yet viewed as impure and deserving of isolation? Only later did I begin to understand that my mother's perpetuation of the practice came from fear—of community judgment, of being labeled impure herself. Her compliance was an act of survival within a structure that left her little room to question.

Years after my first chaupadi, I began working as a social media manager for Stitch for Schools, a non-profit working to empower economically disadvantaged women in Nepal. The organization viewed stitching not merely as a craft, but rather as an opportunity for women to build futures. The quilts these women stitched by hand were sold to Westerners, with the income put toward funding their children's education. I memorialized these women's stories for the world, illustrating their strengths so that they could be acknowledged by, and visible to, people who would likely never meet them: There was Manju Thapa, who was able to triumphantly send her two daughters to school by melding her love for listening to music with quilt stitching. There was also Bimala Rana, who had spent over a decade quilting and had overcome impossible societal and cultural barriers to send her own daughters to school. Manju and Bimala's daughters received an education that had literally been built on the fabric of their mother's labor.

My time at Stitch for Schools reiterated the importance of uplifting women determined to build a better future against all odds. These women and their ability to overcome empowered my own resilience and journey. In fact, their stories came full circle when I served as a guest speaker at Sunrise Valley Academy, an English boarding school, where the children of women who had stitched now studied. I told them about field hockey and debate, how both started with me being way behind and just staying curious enough to catch up. That curiosity, I said, is what still keeps me going, even now toward law school.

During the assembly, one of the students asked me, "Why law school?" The principal stood beside me—a respected figure, but one shaped by the same traditions I had learned to question. I thought about giving a sanitized and polished answer, but instead I remembered my experience with chaupadi—the darkness, the isolation, the cold of those nights. I took a deep breath and chose honesty. Locking eyes with the girl, I said, "Some systems and traditions keep people like us held down. But understanding the law gives us the power to challenge and change them."

In that moment, I understood what had been driving me all along: I want to use the law to challenge the structures that keep women from accessing safety, education, and autonomy. Yet I have also come to realize that even when change is written into law, progress is not guaranteed. Too often, policy shifts fail to reach the people they are meant to protect, leaving a gap between what the law promises and what is lived. I hope to use the law to close that gap—one that continues to persist across generations.

Today, many women have resumed battles regarding bodily autonomy and access to healthcare, once thought to be hard-fought and won. Just as I questioned chaupadi and garnered the strength to find my own path from the women from Stitch for Schools, I hope to use my legal education at Penn Carey Law to address disparities that women in the U.S. face and to push back against systems that seek to control rather than uplift. I plan to use the law to create a mechanism to close these gaps and ensure that justice is not just promised, but practiced.