the inconsistency and injustices of families.
abolish the family?
🎶 Seaside Vacation - Hu Ito (Miyuki Inaba from 13 Sentinels)​
I've been feeling really positive lately, which is funny only insomuch as it highlights how negative I must have been feeling previously. My brain feels brimming with ideas, my heart feels full of possibility, and my life feels chockfull of opportunities in a way that I haven't felt for a while. And what's the cause for it? External success, yet again--which sucks, because I know I cannot continue living my life tethered to the whims of others. But that's a podcast episode for another time...
This week, I write about why family abolition is so provocative of a topic for me and American society, more generally. I also answer two questions from readers, one about skills that one can undertake to prepare for biglaw and another about whether I still recommend becoming a lawyer and biglaw since having left. Finally, I round off with a few articles that I've been reading--you know that the Twitter drama is one of them. Have a great week!!
why is being in a family so hard?
I have always had a complicated relationship with the concept of the family. While I knew that my parents loved me, that knowledge was more intellectual than applied. My parents had never said anything to this effect, but I earnestly felt the conditionality of their love--or perhaps more accurately, my perception of their love (and my own self-love). That "unless" hung in the air, suspended in the seemingly permanent space between us, at the end of the few I love yous exchanged. (My family has since gotten more liberal with our words of affirmation, but saying I love you just wasn't within the ordinary vocabulary of my household, growing up.)
To me, familial love was nothing if not a set of confusing contradictions. My mother was incredibly supportive of me; She once told me that if I ever killed someone, she would help me dispose of the body. At the same time, when she was in her anti-gay marriage period, she off-handedly remarked that she would disown me if I ever came out as a lesbian. With every word, every action, I tried to calibrate my internal sense of the rules of family, woefully ignorant to the fact that consistent rules--and application of those rules--are hardly ever hallmarks of most families.
I used to think that my family's inconsistencies and injustices were unique in some way, a manifestation of "Tiger Mom" carryovers from China, but I now see that the history of families anywhere in the world is rife with inconsistencies and injustices. The Supreme Court once held that it was appropriate to exclude women from the legal profession, and the concurrence even waxed poetic about the natural "respective spheres of man and woman" and a woman's duties of mothering and being a wife in accordance with the "law of the Creator." Under the common law of England (which was imported to the U.S.), women did not exist as legal individuals. Rather, in accordance with the legal principle of "coverture," a woman was one with her father (if unmarried) or her husband (if married). She could not enter into contracts, own property, or earn independent wages, for those activities were "covered" by her male counterpart. So the next time we see a relaxing TikTok of a stay-at-home girlfriend and wish that lifestyle for ourselves, should we reconsider aspiring towards someone saying to us, "Be with me and you'll never have to work a day in your life?"
There has always been an interesting tension between independence and family. We are born into this world dependent upon others for survival. We spend our adolescence learning how to be independent, struggling against the very guardrails which helped ensure our survival in the first place. And then what? I think for many of us (myself included), we don't know. We analyze our attachment styles (I have an anxious attachment style, obvi) and enter into co-dependent or distrusting relationships. We become sugar babies and tell ourselves that being financially dependent on someone else is independence (which maybe is true?). We recoil from the first moment that we begin to trust someone else, lest that be the death of our hard-earned independence. After years of learning that we need to be independent as adults, it's a sick surprise that life then demands that we be dependent on others in order to feel the safety that is commonly only associated with "family." John Mayer has sung about wanting to settle down and have a "home life" for 20 years, and Adele admitted that marriage gave her the "safest" feeling she'd ever had. I spent so many years trying to be independent and get away from my family, only to realize that I needed a family in order to not be alone. What gives?
This bait-and-switch is why I'm so fascinated by the idea of family abolition. The idea isn't new--Marx and Engels made arguments for abolishing the family in connection with their critiques of capitalism, and Plato has even alluded to the idea. Family abolition as a concept is also incredibly ill-defined at this stage--more of an abstract feeling than concrete implementation. Sophie Lewis, the academic and author, envisions family abolition to be more akin to family expansion, where care and nurturing is available outside of the private sphere, where we all can choose to take care of people with whom we are not biologically related, where we can rely on our chosen families (a concept taken largely from queer communities) as much as we do our legal ones. The political commentator David Brooks even wrote an article in March 2020 about how the nuclear family is inappropriate for modern society and advocating for multigenerational households once again and "big tables" for communal living.
Whenever I think about my ideal living situation, it's always some form of "me and my friends with houses all on the same cul-de-sac" or "me and my friends in apartments on the same floor of an apartment complex." It seems so theoretically easy to do, but why then is living outside the confines of the nuclear family so hard to implement? Is it American culture's emphasis on individualism and manifest destiny in the form of hundreds of acres of one's own? Is it, as Marx and Engels posit, the never-ending capitalistic impulse towards generating private wealth for one's family? Whatever it is, I don't like it. I don't need hundreds of acres of land to look out upon. I'm with Virginia Woolf on this one--I just need a room (and bathroom) of my own.
🔖 open tabs
I haven't been able to look away from all of the drama at Twitter. Elon's acquisition of Twitter may be a masterclass in what NOT to do when you acquire a company. The cherry on top is his memo to employees about how everyone "will need to be extremely hardcore" going forward. And when he says hardcore, I am 100% thinking of this scene from Disco Elysium (an excellent and thought-provoking video game, btw!).
Like most others, I see Colleen Hoover's name on book bestsellers lists all the time, but I thought she was sort of like Janet Evanovich, an author whose books I saw all the time when I worked at a used bookstore in high school. Little did I know just how unconventional Hoover's rise to prominence was! As someone who loves the trappings of external validation a little too much, I am astounded and impressed by Hoover's self-publishing beginnings and ability to write so many books for her audience. And yes, I also fell into commentary videos about Hoover... I'm always a sucker for thoughtful critiques, which the comment section of the NYT piece did NOT offer.
Is anyone else going to Anime NYC?? I'll be there on Saturday and Sunday--maybe in cosplay, maybe not (I haven't decided yet!). I'm already so excited to check out the Artist Alley (my Kyoko Kirigiri keychain is from an artist there) and buy a certain plushie backpack that I didn't manage to snag last time.
* This newsletter may contain affiliate links, which are denoted with a *, which means I earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.