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Her voice began to waver, her cheeks flushed and her eyes grew glassy.
Photo byVolkan Olmezon Unsplash
She started to cry.
In front of people.
It caused such an uproar that media outlets like theNew York TimesandNewsweeksaw fit to run entire columns about it.
Others claimed she had faked theemotional outburstto appear more vulnerable.
Culturally, for a long, long time, it has made usveryuncomfortable.
I watched the footage at the time and I knew exactly how Hillary felt.
Dont cry at work is a mantra I carried around as a young producer in the male-dominated movie business.
And there was Clinton, crying at work.
I found it anxiety-provoking to sit across from him:what is he thinking?
Does he like me?
It turns out he thought I was disconnected and hard to access.
We decided to just be friends and I decided to start seeing a therapist.
I told him how it was not until long after my dad died that I really cried about it.
Wasnt this what the world wanted from me?
I am the product of second wavefeminism.
Messy feelings likegrief, passion, love, and fear seemed inconvenient, problematic even.
There was no space for them on my Ivy League school applications.
They didnt seem to have a place on a movie set or in a negotiation.
It neither frightened them nor rendered me weak in their eyes.
Not holding things in allowed me to feel freer, to feel more and more like myself.
One afternoon I had a panic attack in my therapists office.
It got so bad I asked him to hold my hand until it passed.
Shockingly I didnt die of embarrassment.
Instead, I learned I could cry a lot and survive.
And I learned that I needed to mourn my father properly.
I decided to ping the current resident of the apartment where he died.
I arranged a visit, and said my goodbye.
I set up an email address with his name and wrote him letters.
Our lives, and the world as a whole, improve incrementally, but ultimately drastically.
I eventually married Nick and had two kids.
I was mourning the life that had come before and feeling terrified about stepping into something new.
Nick marched me up the hill away from the house and just listened to me enumerate my fears.
He was unfazed without being disinterested.
Eventually I started writing because I no longer felt a need to hide myself away.
In fact, I felt a deep responsibility and desire to share and reveal and connect.
Hillary Clinton too seemed to shift as time passed.
