Green Beer and Sabzeh: Holding Two Cultures with Dialectical Thinking

Full disclosure, this blog is a week late. I created my idea months ago and honestly was pretty jazzed about the concept. And then life happened and I felt more conflicted. Writing this felt too close to current events. So, in true fashion, I procrastinated. I’m sorta glad I did because I have fuller thoughts now. 

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to get it right all the time.

Not just doing things well—but thinking correctly, feeling appropriately, reacting in ways that make sense and hold up under scrutiny. If you’re an overwhelmed, high-achieving person, you probably know this mental gymnastics routine intimately. The constant pressure to land on the right perspective. And then your therapist introduces the idea of dialectical thinking—and at first it just sounds like more work. Another concept. Another thing to practice. Another way you might be doing your own brain wrong.

But it’s actually the opposite.

Dialectical thinking is the practice of holding two seemingly opposing truths at the same time. Not choosing one. Not rushing to resolve the tension. Just… allowing both to exist. I remember sitting in session the first time this came up, immediately wanting to ask, “Okay but which one is the real one?” Which, apparently, is the point.

We’re wired for clarity. For conclusions. For clean narratives like: 

🌀 I’m either doing well or I’m failing.
🌀 I’m either grateful or I’m struggling.
🌀 I either belong here or I don’t.

My therapist gently pointed out that this is kind of my default—turning everything into an either/or, like I’m constantly grading my own life.

These are the common traps—what I’ve learned are called cognitive distortions, but what feel more like “efficiency habits gone rogue.” My brain is trying to simplify. Reduce ambiguity. Protect me from uncertainty. But life—especially the messy millennial life—is rarely that simple.

Dialectical thinking is something my therapist will literally have me practice out loud:

⚖️ I’m doing well in my career, and I’m also deeply burned out.
⚖️ I feel grateful for my life, and I’m still allowed to want more.
⚖️ I can love parts of my identity, and still feel disconnected from others.

Every time I say one of these, it feels slightly unnatural—like I’m cheating on the “real” truth. But apparently, that tension is where the growth is. It’s not indecision. It’s expansion. And honestly, one of the clearest ways this has started to click for me isn’t just in therapy—but in something much more lived-in: the week where St. Patrick’s Day and Nowruz overlap.

If you’re biracial—or bicultural, even someone who exists between identities—you might know this feeling. One day you’re wearing green, maybe half-ironically participating in a cultural tradition that feels both yours and not entirely yours. A few days before, you’re setting a Haft-Seen table, honoring the Persian New Year, engaging in rituals that feel deeply ancestral, grounding, and also…sometimes distant.

Two celebrations. Two cultural identities. Two emotional experiences.

And my instinct is still to sort this out:
Which one is really me?
Which one do I prioritize?
Am I being inauthentic in one space? Not enough in another?

But this is exactly where dialectical thinking sneaks back in—usually in my therapist’s voice in my head, if I’m being honest.

I can feel connected to both cultures, even if that connection looks different in each.
I can celebrate joyfully, and still feel a quiet sense of dislocation.
I can belong, and also feel like I’m observing from the edges.

Both are true.

And when I stop trying to collapse those truths into one neat answer, something loosens. The pressure lifts a little. I don’t have to perform certainty anymore—or pick a “correct” version of myself depending on the room I’m in. So what does dialectical thinking actually look like in real time?

For me, it usually shows up as a pause—right before I spiral into an extreme take. A moment where I catch myself thinking in absolutes—always, never, completely, totally—and remember (sometimes begrudgingly) that there might be more than one truth here. Instead of: This week is overwhelming and I can’t handle it. I try: This week is overwhelming, and I’ve handled hard weeks before. (This one has been reiterated extensively in therapy, to be clear.)

Instead of: I don’t fit anywhere. I try: I don’t fully fit in some spaces, and I am building spaces where I do. It’s subtle. Sometimes it feels a little scripted. But over time, it starts to feel more believable. The key, at least from what I’ve gathered sitting on a couch once a week, isn’t to force yourself to believe the second statement immediately. It’s just to make room for it. To practice letting both sit side by side, even if one feels louder. Because the goal isn’t to eliminate discomfort—it’s to increase your capacity to hold it. (Another line I resisted, and now repeat to myself constantly.)

It’s one thing to hold multiple identities in your own head. It’s another to hold them in a moment where everything around you feels segmented, where nuance gets flattened and people seem to want quick answers about who you are and where you stand. There’s a quiet pressure to make yourself legible, to package your identity into something easily understood—or easily agreed with.

But the truth is, living in that tension isn’t always empowering. Sometimes it’s just exhausting. Sometimes it means sitting in conversations where parts of you feel unseen, or worse, ‘bad’. And I’m realizing dialectical thinking doesn’t magically fix that—it just gives me a way to stay with myself through it. To acknowledge that I can feel proud and conflicted, certain and unsure, connected and alone—all at once. And maybe, in a time that keeps asking us to simplify, choosing not to collapse those truths is its own kind of quiet resistance.