bona fide mala fide

I've already told you this, but I will say it again here. I am having sleep problems in Palo Alto. It feels as if my brain has been eaten, digested, and shat back into my head, and then in the morning I bring it to bar review for a second run through the digestive system. In the afternoons I try to nap but lay in bed instead thinking about the things I have to do. At night I run as quickly as I can for half an hour and come home expecting exhaustion but instead feel a dull ache in my shins and lay in bed thinking about the things I should have done. The symmetry of my sleeplessness, but nothing else about this experience, is pleasant.

Although my brain is excrement, I am trying to use it to think about faith. There is good faith and there is bad faith. A juris doctor, my kind at least, is bad faith. A juris doctor, my kind at least, is trained primarily to have false confidence in her powers of persuasion and in her superior judgment, and therefore feels she can act with impunity, and then does destructive things and trusts in her powers of persuasion to mitigate the damage rather than not doing the hurtful thing in the first place, and then she sends blizzards of contrite verbiage until the person she has hurt has cried uncle and resigned to forgiveness by reason of snowblindness and confusion, and then she triumphantly calls the process a validation of faith. This is part of why people think lawyers are assholes. This is part of why lawyers, my kind at least, talk so loud and say so much nothing. Bad, bad faith.

I told you I didn't know whether I became this way because of the degree or I was drawn to the degree because I was already this way - probably the latter, and even my consideration of the former seems to be yet another example of my bad faith. My brand of bad faith is a variation of the J.D. theme, involving a bad faith in agency-free inertia to scab over open wounds, rub down the sharp edges of jagged things, and redirect the sinuous sapling in the shade to the sunlight where it will bend awkwardly around a wall but continue to grow. Faith in the therapeutic value of doing nothing is bad faith.

There is also good faith. Bona fide, in personam, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ. Good faith is faith in a belief that I act in bad faith to you now but I can and will will myself not to act in bad faith to you in the future. Parse that, dear spear, my linguist. I am searching for this one. Right now it is formless and unknowable and terrible as the face of God. I have sought help in this search, for now in the form of a calm man named Reed who offers sliding scale guidance on Thursdays at 1pm just a two-mile bike ride up the road for me. I am not confident I will find it, but that is in the nature of faith, isn't it? If you're certain then it's not faith anymore, just hubris. So I will just shut up now and have faith in the hunt for good faith. I hope you will too. This was the meaning of the polaris metaphor I botched a few days back when my taste for dramatizing the past ran away with what I wanted to say.

You say I am being vague and opaque in my public writing, but you should know that everything I say I say to reach you, Stephanie.