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There was a feeling I got before I spoke in front of an audience and sometimes also before an event that was less public but still important, an event that could have consequences in my life—taking the LSATs, for example, which I’d done in a classroom on the campus of Harvard. The feeling was a focused kind of anticipation, it was like a weight inside my chest, but it never exactly came from being nervous. I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it. Thus the feeling was a sense of my own competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought,
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I was twenty-one, meaning absurdly young yet old enough to consider myself newly worldly and to see my limited experiences as conclusive.
often secretly experienced my own good fortune as slightly shameful and my impulses toward activism as a form of contrition, but what if I could lead a life that made me worthy of luck? What if getting what I wanted most could be a fuel for my own morality, and additive rather than unfairly advantageous?
“There are two kinds of marriages,” Barbara said. “The ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.”
The less you screw up, the more clearly the public keeps track of each error.
I think the problem was that journalists and voters were asking an individual question that had a collective answer. I did want to help people, and I wanted to help as many people as possible. I did like the work of holding elected office, and I liked doing things I was good at, and I liked being recognized for doing things I was good at. But as much as I wanted to be president, I wanted a woman to be president—I wanted this because women and girls were half the population and we deserved, as a basic human right and a means of ensuring justice, to be equally represented in our government.
