Poker Face
January 18, 2020

     By temperment, whether inborn or acquired through early childhood experience, I am rather risk-averse.  There are costs and benefits to this mode of moving through the world, so to mitigate the costs, and as a matter of personal growth, I try to take on healthy risks, in spite of my default mode.  (And "healthy" does not mean "safe".)  I don't always get it right, but I think I've had enough luck to understand the value of pushing beyond my default settings.

   One thing I don't do, however, is gamble, at least not with money for the purpose of  entertainment.  Also, I don't bluff well, or . . . at all – a fact that might constitute an occupational hazard for an attorney.  I just don't do bullshit.  It takes too much energy.  I can't pull it off.  

     Or can I?

     * * *

   When I was leading the Life Skills classes at Attucks Alternative Academy, a school that exclusively served teenage students deemed "at-risk", one of the ideas I tried to impress on them was that they had the power to change their circumstances – or at least enough of their circumstances to get themselves unstuck from whatever they were mired in.  My go-to metaphor was a poker game, specifically Texas Hold 'Em.  You can't control the cards you‛re dealt in life, I told them, but you can control two things: (1) how you play your cards ("fake it 'till you make it"), and (2) what cards you choose to make a part of your hand.  I even took it a step further and suggested that sometimes, unlike in a poker game, you might even get to trade in one or more of the shitty cards that Life originally dealt you.  You just have to have your eyes open to the possibilities.

     I know the image sank in with at least a few of them.  Many months (perhaps even a few years) after I started using the poker metaphor in those homespun group therapy sessions with the Attucks kids, a parent of a couple of the students told me how much my "card game analogy" had helped her kids, especially her daughter, cope with some of their challenges.  I also continue to keep tabs on some of my most beloved students from those days, so I know that several of them have, in fact, traded in their shitty cards for some darn good ones.  They're great parents now, with beautiful, strong, smart kids of their own (kids they conceived, in some cases, while they were in high school – hence, the "at-risk" label).  They‛re living productive, meaningful lives – lives I'm glad that Attucks, and the school system and society more broadly, took a gamble on.

 * * * 

     And just for the record: I still don't do bullshit.  It's not my style.  Candor and a solid command of the relevant law and facts are more my speed.   I know it works for some attorneys, and I appreciate its utility in many circumstances.  I understand it is an art form that can be compelling, and thus effective, when done well.  But that card's just not in my hand.