A Lot of Things Can Be True at Once

About a year and a half ago, I was talking to my friend who was about to finish law school. He just took the bar, and he vented about how much he hated the structure of law school, and how much he disliked the contradictory messages he got from his peers and professors.

I learned a long time ago to take every piece of unsolicited advice with a huge grain of salt. Everyone is different, after all.

But the contradictory messages my friend got were people telling him things like “you have to take care of yourself” and “there are more important things than law school.” But a lot of the same friends and professors would also say “you have to segment your day into strict 15 minute blocks and not waste a second of the day” and “you have to break up with your girlfriend because you don’t want those distractions during finals.”

There were also messages like “happy hour is your best friend,” which goes against the whole “take care of yourself” message.

I laughed when he told me all this, but last week, I went through my own law school orientation and heard a lot of the same messages. No, not everyone is talking about happy hour during the first week of law school, but we have heard the same professors stress the importance of self-care and taking breaks simultaneously tell us something like “if you show up to class not doing the reading and unprepared, when you get called on by the professor, you will embarrass yourself and it won’t look good.”

For people who don’t know, law school classes use the Socratic method of teaching. The Socratic method means professors call on students at random about facts of court cases and essentially interrogate them. It can be very daunting to have not have an answer to the professor’s questions.

First of all, it’s different for evening law school students like myself. I have a day job that’s pretty demanding, but my other colleagues have jobs, children, and families. I have no clue how they’re going to balance it, but to have studied to get into law school and managed those responsibilities at the same time means everyone has a system of balancing things that have worked reasonably well, to some degree.

So all these contradictions do have to coexist. I’m not talking about going to happy hour every week, but we do have to be simultaneously prepared, make sacrifices, not burn out, and work at a sustainable pace. There are different messages that take precedence in certain situations and depending on the person.

That doesn’t mean I think my friend was wrong for being frustrated with the seeming hypocrisy of the culture of law school, but just that those contradictions and hypocrisies exist everywhere in our society.

Why we give such mixed messages

I’ve lived with these contradictions in my job as well. Although I am moving into a higher-up job in my school system, as a teacher, you are told you have to be well-prepared, get all your stuff in on time, sacrifice for the kids, be a martyr, stay late and be extra committed, all while being told how important it also is to set work-life boundaries and take care of yourself. It can be very confusing early in your career, and different people have different individual perceptions of what that balance looks like, but I personally found my way after my first year.

I think life largely is full of these contradictions and nuances. I know scientists and very educated doctors who somehow balance ideas of creationism in their heads and fully believe them. I know people who make four times as much money as me and who come from significantly more privileged households be far more socialist and post more about social justice on Twitter than I do.

I used to think about contradictions in terms of my faith and the gospel — there are a lot of contradictions in the gospel between Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. I used to think these contradictions undermined the credibility of the faith. But famous Paulo Coelho got me to think a bit differently about the significance of those contradictions — especially since Jesus lived a life full of contradictions, and contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

I know not everyone is religious, but we give these mixed messages as a society too. Hustle hard — but take care of your mental health. Sacrifice for your children — but take care of yourself. Take risks and get out of your comfort zone — but don’t say anything that’s going to get you in trouble in today’s climate.

We give these contradictory thoughts at the end of the day because we’re human. And sometimes, we need to engage, whether consciously or subconsciously, in the art of cognitive dissonance and living with contradictory information.

You can be the most social justice and equity-minded person in the world. But you’re not thinking about the cheap or possibly child labor that went into making your phone every time you pick it up. You’re not thinking of how you’re contributing to housing inequities in America when you want to live in a home or apartment you consider safe and nice. There are countless examples of how our actions don’t align with what we preach, in good and bad ways.

Takeaways

I guess the point is people in law school are humans too. I am just at the beginning of this journey but I can already see that people are really stressed out and apprehensive, and that it is a lot of work and rigorous. But it’s also important to step back and live your life.

Living with nuance is somewhat of a lost art when you think real life is Twitter, but if I were to define it to someone, it means realizing a lot of things can be true at once.

As a parent, you can hold the truth that you have to make sacrifices and put your child before yourself. You can also hold the truth that parenting is super stressful and sometimes you need a break.

As a teacher, I held the simultaneously truths that I loved my students and was really devoted to my job. I answered a lot of calls and did a lot of work past work hours no matter how much I tried not to. But I also held the truth that it was just a job, and I had to take a step back and put my own well-being first so I could put my kids first.

As a marathon runner, I woke up really early one day to do a workout on the track. During our warm-up, I was telling a friend “yeah, running has been going a lot better because I’ve been taking it a lot less seriously and it’s pretty far down on the list of priorities in my life.” And then my friend noted that it was 5:30 a.m., and we had gotten up to run, which inherently contradicted my claim that I didn’t take running that seriously.

That doesn’t mean all these contradictions are incompatible. We can be committed and hard-working, and also know when to step on the brakes and stop taking ourselves seriously.

Law school is a microcosm for human behavior as a whole. Work hard, study hard, but also chill and remind yourself there are way more important things in life.

All those messages are true — not only for law students, but for people as a whole.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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