June 1st, 2020 22:31

I arrived home after picking up dinner for myself. My dad was sitting in a lawn chair on the driveway drinking a beer as he watched the sky change from light blue to orange to pink to deep blue. I grabbed my favorite IPA from the fridge and sat next to him. I quickly brought up the Black Lives Matters protests that were taking place across our country in response to the death of George Floyd. I loved sorting out thoughts and processing feelings with my dad. I had always looked up to him and as I grew up he was the first point of inquiry as I went from wondering why I have to eat green vegetables when they taste so abhorrent to what the word ‘photosynthesis’ meant to ‘where do dogs go when they die’ which all led us to ‘what are your thoughts on everything that’s happening right now’? The conversations mirrored the questions in their growing complexity and multi-faceted nature. We also began to question each other more as time passed and knowledge was gained. I no longer took every word he said to be glimmering or sometimes painful, truth, albeit my initial reaction was always to believe him. It’s what I’d done my entire life. But now I was taking a college course that taught me about the research conclusions of Piketty and Scheidel and the historical coupling of violent riots with vast reform. I was watching the news for hours each day, growing more angry and aware of how much I had yet to learn. So my dad and I disagreed about the state of present-day America. He was upset at the looting, and professed that we as Americans had it relatively good, and should be grateful for the freedoms guaranteed to us. I agreed that gratitude was warranted, but so was my anger in how those freedoms are not equitably distributed among races, classes, genders, religious affiliations, and sexual orientations. And I did not relinquish my opinions and feelings and ideas before him as I had for so long. I stood my ground, proclaiming that there are deep cracks in our structures that demand repair. He called me ‘delusional’ and ‘pessimistic’. The latter jab hurt more than the former, as I pride myself on my ability to be optimistic in even the most dreadful circumstances, like that time I was pickpocketed in New Zealand only a week into a two-month trip, losing all of my money and forcing me to rely on strangers and hostel acquaintances I had just met to fund me for a few weeks. Or that time I got wretchedly sick in a small town in Italy and could not communicate with the doctor who was treating me due to language barriers. Or that time I found out one of my parents was having an affair and couldn’t tell anyone because it felt like it wasn’t my place and the release of such news would surely crumble what semblance of a ‘normal’ familial structure I had left. Or that time I was on vacation in Mexico with my family and had a panic attack daily and couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways I or a loved one might die and my anxiety and OCD had gotten so bad that I did not eat nor sleep for days on end. I wept and felt afraid and replayed the same dark thoughts in my head until I could go back home to Texas to see my psychiatrist and get back on medication immediately. Optimism and the belief in the goodness and intuition of people I did not know got me through life. Optimism is what kept me from giving up when giving up was the easiest route. It was a belief grounded in positivity and silver linings but not to be mistaken for naivety. It required courage and persistence in seeing what good existed even in the hardest of circumstances. My loyalty to optimism as a belief system is the very reason I care so much about what is happening in our country and our world on a day-to-day basis. I believe in our ability to transform, to become better, to understand each other more, to enact equitable policies on every level, and to have leadership that reflects compassion for everyone. My belief in the good that we can collectively accomplish is what led to my profound interest in activism, law, and justice. I believe that through law we can profoundly shape the future that lay ahead, in ways that are beneficial to people and entities that were formerly or are currently dispossessed. The profession of law is for optimists. My dad and I will keep having the difficult conversations that reality presents us, and I will keep growing and learning and leading with optimism. I hope he eventually sees in me the optimism that guides me on this career path.