I'd like to reflect for a few moments on the gift
of not fitting in. Now that may seem a
strange choice of topic for this occasion.
Graduations are all about triumphal achievements. You made it!
You're in the club! You've earned
a place at the table! And now you are
ready to launch what will surely be an illustrious career!
Some part of us always, at
some level, wants to find the place where we fit, where the combination of our
talents and gifts are received and experienced as being exactly what is
needed. When you arrived at law school,
you likely hoped you would find a peer group of like-minded people, and that
your skill set would turn out to be very well-matched to the demands of your
legal education. I hope and expect that,
to a fair degree, you found those things, and that you are leaving law school
feeling like you belong. I hope also
that you find that your skill set is very well-matched to the demands of the
bar exam and of your first legal job, and that you will quickly find work that
calls forth the best of you. I want all
of that for you.
But it’s important to
acknowledge that that hopeful scenario is regularly not what the very best
people experience. I know that already,
in law school, many have you have encountered circumstances in which you did NOT
fit. Perhaps you agonized over
processing so much complex verbal information on the spot—maybe you needed more
time to think about it than you got when you were cold-called in class or when
you were taking an exam. Or maybe you
had family obligations that greatly exceeded those of most of your
classmates. Or your reasons for coming
to law school or your expectations for how to talk about legal problems were
not echoed among your peers or affirmed by your professors.
Perhaps you secretly died a
little inside whenever a professor called your name in class, because talking
about law didn't feel like it came naturally to you. Or perhaps you were convinced that it took
you three times as long to read the material as it did your classmates. Perhaps the way discussions materialized in
class frequently frustrated you, and the answers the law offers to the social problems
it encounters regularly left you dissatisfied.
Perhaps you were paralyzed with fear before each exam or court
appearance. Perhaps you never quite lost
the sense of being the creature from another planet.
That's okay. In fact, it's better than okay. My suggestion to you this morning is that the
extent to which you don't fit in is actually a gift.
Let me explain. Our longing to fit in is understandable, but
it omits a few things from the larger picture.
What attracted many of you to
law in the first place was a sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are
in the world. You were troubled by
injustices that you perceived, and you wanted to acquire the tools for righting
those injustices. You were bothered by a
sense that people are getting left behind, without anyone to fight for them,
and you wanted to fill those gaps.
Your passion to right such
wrongs is a big clue that our institutions are not already perfect the way they
are. There are gaps they leave
unaddressed. Our systems do not always
ask the right questions, nor do they always provide access to meaningful
justice. As good as our legal system is,
it could stand to improve. That may well
be what attracted you to the law in the first place, a desire to improve it, or
to find a way to better marshal its resources.
Yet these are the very
institutions you want to fit into. These
are the institutions you hope will want what you have to offer. How realistic is that wish?
I can use my own experience as
an example of this disconnect. I went to
law school out a desire to save the world, to be a voice for the voiceless, and
I did not readily buy into the way things were done. When I entered the legal profession, it
should not have surprised me that in my first jobs, I quickly perceived things
that didn't work well, that needed fixing. Usually, I wasn’t wrong—but my instincts were
off. With the best of intentions, I
would helpfully point out those problems to the people in charge, expecting
them to say, thank you so much, Darleen, for pointing out to us just how wrong
we have been all along. Finally you are
here to point out to us the error of our ways.
Hooray! You fit perfectly into a
space that was waiting for you.
But of course that never
happens! It is easier for me to see this
now than it was at the time--at the time I just felt some combination of
foolish and disillusioned. I can now see
that sometimes, I was indeed bringing skills that were lacking, and I was
correctly perceiving flaws in the way an institution was functioning. But that didn't mean I fit in. In fact, it usually meant the opposite.
Fitting in is actually not all
it's cracked up to be. It feels good, but
it can also blind you. It can seduce you
into excusing ways in which our institutions are blind or regressive. This is what is seductive about privilege—and
you are leaving law school with a fair amount of that; the more you are
benefitting from a system, the less visible its flaws will be to you. That is the very definition of fitting in. The lessons you have been taught about fitting
in often are teaching you NOT to question what is. And you can’t be leaving law school without
having received a lot of those lessons.
Which brings me to the gift of
not fitting in. It is precisely those
who don't fit in who are most capable of seeing what needs changing. Not fitting in generally keeps them from
benefitting from the way things are, so they are not so reluctant to question the
status quo. It is almost invariably
those who don't fit in, the outsiders, who are able to see the mechanics of
injustice, or privilege, or oppression, and to discern ways of correcting those
problems that no one else can see, or that no one else is WILLING to see.
Now I must warn you: pointing out
those things is not a job that pays well.
This is not a way to become popular.
But it is the surest way--the only way--to make a meaningful difference
in the world. Those who don't fit in,
the outsiders, become our lasting heroes.
Think of it: the most heroic
actions of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Thurgood
Marshall, Temple Grandin, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Minoru Yasui all
sprang from the ways in which they did not fit in with the cultures and
institutions they affected. They pushed
back on accepted wisdom, often at great cost, often against pressure to JUST
FIT IN. We admire these people mostly—or
only—AFTER they succeed in bringing about change—but while they were doing it,
they were resented, sometimes intimidated into silence, bullied, criticized,
and threatened. Make no mistake, though:
it is precisely the ways they didn’t fit in that fueled their insights and
their willingness to sacrifice what they did.
Looked at in this light, the ways you don't fit in are a
gift. When you don't fit in, when you
find yourself on the fringe, look for what your life is trying to teach
you. Embrace the edge, because it is the
way to the center--the way to living in a manner that is "not grasping at
the superficial and protecting the surface of things," as Richard Rohr has
named.
This perspective on not fitting in can help you to see your
failures and setbacks in a more accurate light.
They are nearly always windows into what is deeply true. Try to meet them with openness rather than
frustration. Don't assume there is
something wrong with you that needs fixing so that you will fit in better. Don’t rage against a system that doesn't see
your value. This is easier said than
done! I do a lot of that kind of raging,
so this message is for me as much as it is for you.
You may well do a bit of raging, and a fair bit of attempting
to conform. But if you learn to see not
fitting in as a gift, it may help you to remember to look for a third way, a
way in which you honor yourself and what you bring even when the institutions
and systems where you don't fit seem to be insisting that you change or that
there isn't a place for you. Working to
fit in often means cooperating in a dehumanizing process of erasing yourself
and what you can see; embracing the value of not fitting in may just be what
humanizes you even inside a flawed system that only wants your compliance.
I like to call this "Hustle and Flow"--and yes, I
did arrive at the concept from watching the film about a sex trafficker who
wants to be a rapper. I have had lots of
experiences of not fitting in, and they are often quite discouraging, and even
painful. Some of you have heard me tell
the story about a particularly painful encounter that I had with another judge
early in my judicial career in which he responded to my request for mentoring
by proceeding to tell me in great detail how everything about me was wrong and
that if I didn't set about fixing myself I would irretrievably lose the respect
of my colleagues. How's that for not
fitting in! That message, delivered with
authority and confidence and even as though he was doing me a favor, knocked me
flat.
At the time that happened, though, I had been in the legal
world for a while so I knew not to react right away, but to sit with the
experience and see what it might have to teach me.
A couple of weeks later, I saw the film "Hustle and
Flow," which, as I said, is about a sex trafficker who wants to be a
rapper. I don't actually know any sex
traffickers, and am not a rap music fan, but I really became absorbed in the
story. And about three quarters of the
way in, the sex trafficker commits a crime (besides being a sex trafficker),
and lands in prison. There's no doubt
he's guilty; you watch him do it. But
during the ensuing scenes of him in prison, I had an epiphany: my contributions to the judiciary are not likely
to involve success in all the ways defined for me by my colleague who asserted that
everything about me was wrong. The
criteria for success by which he assessed my suitability would never be the
best way to measure my achievements. But
my job does involve listening to the stories of people like the sex trafficker
in "Hustle and Flow." And I
recovered the sense that the most important gifts I bring to that work have to
do with being the kind of person who can listen to the story of a marginalized
and even distasteful person, a story that everyone thinks they already know,
and to remain deeply engaged and watchful for what I may be called upon to do
in response to his story.
That realization helped me to stand on my feet again, and to be
ready for the next realization: Ignoring
what the helpful senior judge told me was not a good option. I would be doing so at my peril. He had just imparted the criteria by which
he, at least, would judge me, indeed was judging me, and he was by no means
marginalized in the system I was in. It
was hard to hear, but it was good information.
It communicated that I indeed did need to make some changes to my
approach to my work in order to succeed well enough that I could attain and
maintain some credibility and be effective.
It was also incomplete information. It didn’t tell me how I could be my best self
as a judge, how to preserve the parts of me that were deeply needed. The ways in which I don't fit are clues to
that. In fact, they are part of why I am
a person who can listen deeply to a story about a marginalized person, a story
that everyone thinks they already know, and remain deeply engaged and looking
for what action that story demands of me.
So whatever adjustments I made in order to better fit into the system I
am in, I also needed to make those adjustments in a way that honored who I am
at my core.
That's what I like to call "hustle and flow." Hustle is the part where you work hard to
succeed on the terms of the system that you are in. You hone your skills as a writer. You wear a suit when people expect that of you. You turn things in on time. You work to understand the point of view of
others, even those who don't show you the same courtesy. It has to be done. You can't just refuse to participate in
things that seem like flawed exercises to you, any more than you can blow off
the deeply flawed exercise of the bar exam and expect to succeed at practicing
law.
But flow is respecting who you are, and continuing to honor
the parts of you that don't fit. That
also is your job and, often, if you don't do it, no one else will. The ways in which you don't fit are a
gift. They are clues to what is missing,
to what and who are being left behind.
Often when you don't fit, it is because you are marshalling data that the
people who are succeeding aren't attempting to account for, data that the existing
criteria for success has failed to include.
Most of the injustices in the world involve artificially limiting our
data set so that we can feel successful without taking into account the true
costs and the true impacts of our actions.
Honoring and appreciating the ways in which you don't fit
will help you do that for others, and that is work the world sorely needs. Listen for the voices of people who don't
fit, and ask why they don't fit. And
don't rush to the explanation that there is something wrong with them. The criteria for success are devised by those
who have already succeeded on existing terms.
Often job descriptions are not written to include qualities that an
institution sorely needs, because those who wrote them can't envision what they
have never experienced before, and unconsciously resist any suggestion that
someone could bring something vital to the organization that no one has offered
before--or that has been offered and refused.
The ways in which you don't fit are a gift. In honoring you as you graduate, I want to
especially honor those gifts of yours, and hope that you will find ways to
honor them too.
No comments:
Post a Comment