There have been instances where I find my friends/coworkers getting slightly irritated with me, because they say I don’t give definitive answers to their questions.

For example:

Q: What’s your favorite movie?

A: Well it depends… are you talking about the movie I can keep seeing over and over again or a movie that has had a longing impact on my life?

Q: Would you divorce/break up with your husband if he was caught cheating on you?

A: Well it depends… how often/long has he been seeing this other woman? Does he love her? Does he want to leave me? Do we have children?

For me, nothing has ever been black & white; everything has always been grey. That’s what I am – subjective in my thinking, almost to a fault.  I’ve been around people who are fiercely objective. Rules are rules. Principles are principles. No if, ands, or buts.  And these people are also the ones that probably find my “wishy-washy” perspective as weak, fickle, and void of strong convictions.  These people are the ones who are strong proponents of absolute truth. After all, isn’t my faith supposed to be based off of an absolute truth? And that’s actually why I struggle and wrestle with it at times. This is what is true to me, but is it true to everyone?

But as my mind broadens, I’ve come to realize that rules are not just rules. And what you see isn’t all that’s there. There are layers of complexity behind each unique situation.  Yes, that person might’ve acted out irrationally or physically, but it might be due to years and years of being horribly treated by cops.  Yes, those cops might’ve been a bit rough or presumptuous, but it might be due to years and years of violent reactions from their perpetrators. I acknowledge there is some danger associated with this relativist plane of thinking. Then you’ll start excusing all types of disruptive behavior and attribute it to a bad childhood or past.  But how much behavior can be pardoned by a rocky past and how much cannot? Where do we draw the line? Being in the grey is trickier, more complicated – but sometimes life can’t be defined by clear lines.

I wondered if this type of perspective would make me a bad or good lawyer.

edit:

How did Kimmy Schmidt know I was going to write about this?

Weird.