Asheville Attorney Natalia Talbot Models Courage in the Face of Difficulty
Natalia Talbot
When you think of the word “resilience,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? I think about an established tree, one that has lived for decades. Perhaps this tree has weathered storms and extreme heat and cold. Still, it continues to thrive despite adverse conditions and threats to its well-being.
Although resilience might evoke this quiet strength, a different way to think of the word is as a dynamic force – an unwavering perseverance that empowers something, or someone, to adapt. The word’s etymology is helpful in illuminating how this second definition is closer to its meaning, denoting a sense of energy rather than passivity.
“Resilience” derives from the Latin root word “resilio,” which means “to leap or spring back.”
Beyond its definition as a word or a concept, resilience is a quality, one that a person develops over time, often by overcoming difficult experiences in life. In short, the ability to move forward following difficulties you have faced is resilience.
Natalia Talbot, a construction law attorney who practices with Capua Law Firm in Asheville, demonstrates this quality of resilience in her work and her life. She understands how one’s personal experiences with trauma, when unaddressed, can impact all areas of one’s life. Because of her experiences, Talbot advocates for others in the profession and outside it, encouraging them to view their mental health as a priority.
Talbot’s ability to face her grief following unexpected tragedies and to move forward is a story of personal courage.
Residing with her husband and two children in Asheville, Talbot is a dedicated attorney. Originally from Ohio, she graduated from Columbia University, where she majored in anthropology and minored in German. After graduation, she joined Teach for America and moved to Waianae, Hawaii, where she taught eighth grade science for two years from 2008 to 2010. During her time in Hawaii, she earned a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
In recalling her experiences with Teach for America, she describes what it was like to go from her life in New York to a place where most of the students she taught were impoverished. Few students aspired to go to college, she said, because nobody had ever believed in them and college was not the logical path of life forward. Many planned to follow in the footsteps of their parents or siblings, who worked in tourism or on the docks in Hawaii.
“My students’ families were just inundated with legal issues, whether it was that they were homeless because they couldn’t afford their rent, or the child was in some kind of protective custody or foster care. It might be because somebody else in the family was court-involved,” she said.
What she observed made her realize that she wanted to become an attorney so that she could help people facing challenges like those that her students and their families had encountered.
The year after her tenure with Teach for America ended, Talbot entered Boston College Law School and graduated in 2013. Her first role after law school was as Assistant District Attorney in Massachusetts. In 2018, she moved to North Carolina, working first as a law clerk in Asheville and next as a bankruptcy law practitioner with a firm in Winston-Salem before transitioning focus areas to construction law with her current firm.
Talbot serves with the NCBA as a board member of BarCARES, a program that provides free and confidential counseling to NCBA members. As an advocate for mental health and well-being, Talbot has written about why legal professionals should give value to their mental health, and, when it is needed, pursue mental health resources, including therapy, support groups and other tools.
In 2022, Talbot composed an article on the topic of mental health for individuals of all ages in the legal profession. Her piece was selected as the award-winning submission in the NCBA Young Lawyers Division Writing Contest and published on NCBarBlog. Because May is Mental Health Awareness Month, it is the perfect time to reflect on this important topic and to hear Talbot’s story firsthand.
As you may have read in her piece, Talbot lost her younger sister, who was 28 at the time, to suicide in November 2018. That same year, Talbot moved from Boston to Asheville with her husband. She has experienced deep pain, and yet, over the past few years, she has also known great joy. She became a mom, made a home in Asheville and joined a firm in which she thrives. In 2024, she became a partner with Capua Law Firm.
Throughout these moments in her life, Talbot has continued to hone her practice, and to grow in empathy and compassion for others as she has worked to heal. Seeing a therapist, as well as being open with others about seeking help, was an important step in her journey to where she is today.
“The loss of my sister was the most devastating thing that ever happened in my life. It still is. I have lost other people and missed them dearly. But losing your sibling, who you expect to be with you for the rest of your life, and especially the way she died, it tore me apart. It was like somebody had just chopped off my arm, and I was figuring out how to live the rest of my life without that arm.”
“I think the biggest thing, and I try to make this point in the article, was that we all need to talk about mental health more. We have to remove the stigma or lessen it. At all levels, people should talk about their mental health. If we’re all being open about it, and it does take vulnerability – you have to be brave to put yourself out there – but the more we do it, you’re going to feel comfortable prioritizing your mental health,” she said.
Talbot’s sense of loss was all too real, but she didn’t immediately seek out therapy. It took her time to realize that she needed to talk with someone. At a certain point, she began to see that she had to address her grief.
Leading up to November 2018, Talbot had experienced a season of joy, and a time of new beginnings both in her personal and professional life. In October, Talbot got married. Around the same time, she applied to a position in Asheville and was offered the job.
The moment felt like a fairy tale – an enchanted moment filled with light.
“My husband and I were living in Boston. I was a prosecutor there, and we got married in October. We had this great wedding. My whole family was there, including my late sister, my mom, and my best friend. We were on top of the world.”
“I got offered this job, and it was almost like, our dreams are coming true, we’re moving to Asheville, because it was this very cool, magical place. We loved mountain culture. We wanted to be somewhere that was less expensive than Boston so we could afford it. We wanted to raise our family. We didn’t have any family in the Asheville area, but we came here and just fell in love with it. We were very excited to move here.”
Talbot had given her notice to her job as a prosecutor that she would be relocating. She and her husband were preparing to move to the beautiful city in the mountains, one that has been described as “the land of the sky.”
And then, suddenly, her world went dark.
“Six weeks after our wedding, after I’d already accepted the job here, my sister died. It was Thanksgiving 2018.
“I went to Los Angeles, which is where she lived, and I did all of the administrative aspects of her death, because I’m the only attorney in the family. So I was the logical person to go out there and do it, then I went back to Boston. I packed up our apartment and moved to North Carolina a week later.”
After moving to North Carolina with her husband, Talbot began her new job, the first of her three positions in Asheville. Since then, she has found her place at Capua Law. But she remembers what it felt like to start over and to join a new firm during this season, when she was trying to not think about her loss.
“It felt like I could just ignore this thing that just happened. I could just walk around this new employment place and pretend like I’m fine, and nothing terrible has just happened in my life, and my sister didn’t just die. And I didn’t just pick out her coffin. It felt like maybe I could just ignore it,” said Talbot. “I think I thought that way because I had never experienced true grief, true loss of that level before in my life.”
She tried to compartmentalize what she felt, but her efforts could only go so far. As she met people in her new city, they began to ask about her life. And those questions led her back to remembering her sister.
“In my mind, I’m thinking, I can just sweep it under the rug, like no one will know – like I don’t have to talk about it. And then, of course, the first thing people do when you’re in a new location, and you don’t know anyone, is ask you about your family. Where are you from? Do you have siblings? Where do your parents live? I was trying to sort of save them from dealing with my pain by not talking about it.”
After arriving in Asheville, Talbot thought she could muscle through the grief on her own, but Talbot’s husband made her first appointment with a grief therapist and helped her find suicide loss support groups and even attended them with her. Soon after, Talbot began to realize the value of therapeutic support. Although the sense of loss she felt didn’t completely disappear, she began to develop the tools and coping skills she needed to process what had happened. In 2020, Talbot joined a firm as an associate attorney in bankruptcy law.
While in therapy, she was trying to work through the grieving process, and, at the same time, to hone her skills and practice in her new firm.
“I felt like I was constantly hitting this wall where partners would ask me to do things, and I think, yes, I can do it, and then go 100 percent in that direction. But then, this awful grief would just completely envelop me, and I felt like I couldn’t move. So I felt like I was telling them ‘Yes, I can do it, and I have limitations.’
“I can do it, but I have therapy at four on Wednesdays. I can do it, but I have to run to the pharmacy to refill my prescription. I felt like I was trying to balance my mental health with the demands of my job. And because I was saying, ‘I have to go to see my therapist; I have to refill my antidepressant,’ it just felt like people looked at me a little differently. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but it felt like I had to explain why I was trying to prioritize my mental health.”
While Talbot was balancing her mental well-being and the demands of her practice, she came face to face with loss again. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, Talbot experienced unforeseen tragedies. She lost her mother to a terminal illness, ALS. Then, the week before her mother’s funeral, her best friend died in a plane crash. In the same season, Talbot became pregnant, and at the 13-week mark, experienced a miscarriage.
“All of these incredibly tragic accidents and kinds of things, it seemed to me like I just was having these constant lightning strikes from the universe. It felt almost crushing to me, but I was also trying to put on this appearance of, I’m efficient, and I want you to call me for your projects, and I want to write your briefs. I wanted to be the associate that all the partners thought of when they had something that they needed to be done,” she said.
“And I was trying to manage this other job I had of grieving, going to therapy, going to support groups, and supporting my family, who were also grieving.”
In the summer of 2022, Talbot learned of the Young Lawyers Division Writing Competition. The prompt asked how she envisioned the legal profession would change or should change in the future. The question encouraged her to think about what might help other practitioners who found themselves in similar circumstances to those she had faced – practitioners who were familiar with trying to balance personal loss, mental health struggles, or other issues, and, at the same time, continue giving their all in their careers.
The prompt gave her space to think about what needed to change in the profession so that attorneys would feel supported in taking actions beneficial for their mental health.
“I wanted to be able to speak to the baby boomer attorney, to named partners of law firms and to the Gen Z law student who was just coming into this field. There are small things we can do together to prioritize mental health, but it takes a community to do it,” said Talbot.
When asked how attorneys can support members of the bar in pursuing mental health and well-being, Talbot says one of the first steps is to normalize discussions about this topic.
Talbot pictured at the Capua Law office in Boone.
She recalls how not long after she joined Capua Law Firm, Paul Capua modeled empathy and understanding by talking with her.
“The first year that I worked there, he came into my office. He said to me, ‘Hey, I just wanted to say that I know that this time of year is really hard for you.’ And that was the whole conversation. I think I said thank you. I really appreciate that. And then we moved on.
“The fact that he acknowledged it meant so much to me. It spoke volumes about him, and it also reinforced that I had made the right choice in coming there because I knew he was compassionate. He understood that I was a whole person, not just an attorney.”
This is important, Talbot shares, because the stigma associated with going to therapy can be one reason people are hesitant to talk about what they are going through, or to go to therapy at all.
In addition to acknowledging what someone is going through, another way to lessen any stigma is to be open about going to therapy. Talbot now has her counseling appointment clearly labeled as “therapy” in her calendar, so that others are aware of it. This has encouraged another co-worker to label their appointment in this way, too. This openness helps others to see that like Natalia, they can prioritize their mental health.
“It’s totally OK to be in pain and to not be OK. It’s OK to not be OK,” she says. “Those are the messages that I hope people take away from the blog post, that you don’t have to remain in pain. There are things you can do to get help, and you should, and should advocate for yourself.
“The employee has to advocate, and the employer has to be flexible. Employers need to recognize that advocating for their employee’s mental health is beneficial. You’re going to lose talent if you don’t recognize that they are full people with problems and issues. But you have to balance the needs of your business at the same time. And so, you have to be flexible.”
In Talbot’s experience, she first realized she needed to seek out therapy, and next, began to see that we must normalize how we view mental health. Beyond viewing mental health with acceptance, another roadblock to overcome is the general hesitation individuals might have about making the first therapy appointment, joining a grief support group, talking with someone or taking the next step.
What would Talbot say to individuals who know they may need help but are hesitant to find support?
“The first thing you have to ask yourself is, what is holding you back from seeking the next step? Is it having to acknowledge that you’re struggling? Is it having to acknowledge that you’re in pain? Is it time and resources? If it’s finding the resources, there are so many resources out there for legal professionals,” she says.
Talbot and her family.
Those resources include BarCARES, and as Talbot mentions in the article, the NC Lawyer Assistance Program, CLEs related to attorney mental health and substance abuse, the Lawyers Depression Project, Dial 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline), the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs (CoLAP), and Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers.
For Natalia, it was a personal loss that led her to begin therapy. For others, it may be something different – including living in a city devastated by a natural disaster, such as Hurricane Helene, which hit the city in September 2024.
Talbot, who witnessed the devastation, was moved by the care and compassion she felt from her fellow NCBA members.
“The first week after the storm, Judge Lucy Inman, the president of BarCARES, reached out to me just to say, ‘Are you OK? Are you alive? Thumbs up if you can get this message.’ And I told her we’re alive, we’re safe. We don’t have water, power, cell service, or Internet. It is apocalyptic here, like the Stone Age,” said Talbot.
“We didn’t have power in the office for about two weeks. We didn’t have water in Asheville until late November, so it was six or seven weeks that none of us were really working in the office. Or if we did, we were bringing water jugs in to wash our hands and flush the toilets. And for drinking water.
“Traffic in Asheville was unbelievable. It should be a 25- to 30-minute commute for me, and it would be 45 minutes to an hour. I think one night took me an hour and a half. It’s just because there’s no other route.
“All of the traffic that would normally go around Asheville was now coming through Asheville, so you had this area that had been devastated by this disaster. And then you had all this excess traffic coming in, people without water, people without electricity and cell phone service and still trying to rebuild, still trying to find their loved ones.”
Talbot says people are continuing to recover from the initial shock of what happened, and that some people are beginning to be aware that they might need to seek out therapy or other mental health resources or support.
“I’m now just starting to see people talk about wanting to find a therapist or saying things like, I should be in therapy, I think I have trauma, I think I have PTSD or I’m afraid of storms now. People are not necessarily ready to find mental health help, but BarCARES is very dedicated to making sure that they’re there for the Western districts, and for anybody else.”
Sometimes, the effects of trauma following such an incident are evident in the fear and other emotions that people feel. She shares that in March, there were many nights with high wind. On those nights, she received text messages from friends who said they were afraid.
The effects have impacted people on a personal level, and they have also impacted the city on a massive scale.
“We weren’t prepared, and we don’t really know the full extent of the damage. Rebuilding, it’s going to take a long time,” said Talbot. “One statistic I heard from the City of Asheville was that in the first quarter of 2025, Asheville lost approximately $58 million of potential tourist income. I don’t know how you ever recover that.”
Despite the personal losses she has faced and the large-scale destruction brought about by the recent storm, Talbot reminds herself of all she is grateful for.
She feels thankful to be alive today.
“I think what has helped me balance my life better is coming out from that perspective of there’s no guarantee for tomorrow,” she said. “Once you reframe your perspective and understand that the only guarantee you have is right now, in the present, I think that helps you. You see things differently.”
Talbot with her family in Pennsylvania at the Trolley Museum.
If Talbot’s perspective has changed as she has moved forward by processing and healing from loss, she hopes others will continue to change their perspective on mental health and find the resources they need so they can adapt. Encouraging others to consider how they view mental health – their own and that of those with whom they work – was the original goal of her article published on the YLD blog.
To be able to move forward, Talbot has worked with her therapist, been a part of a grief support group and felt support offered by family, friends and co-workers. When others are there to stand beside you, you can face whatever it is you are going through.
Her story is a testament to the idea that if the legal profession can support its members as they prioritize their mental health and well-being, the better and stronger the profession will be.
“That brings me back to my original point – it’s a community,” she says. “If we’re all talking about seeking mental health help, and we’re all talking about what we can be doing to improve it, then I think we would see a lot less resistance. There’d be a lot less reluctance. It might take generations of change to get there.
“But I think we’re on that path.”
Jessica Junqueira is communications manager for the North Carolina Bar Association.