She pauses just slightly, and I pause too. “I know I was hard on you,” she says. “But I . . . I know what it’s like, being a woman in politics. I don’t want to see you make stupid mistakes. You have a lot of potential. You should live up to it.” I’m thirty-five, not twenty-two, I want to tell her. I am too old to be patronized like this and too young to have bought into Lean In. I don’t just have potential; I have success.
