Dear Hillary,
Let's get a couple of things out of the way first. I don't like you. I have never liked you. I believe it would be a tragedy of monumental, historically destructive proportions if you were elected President of this country. I struggle internally with whether it might even be worse than having a President McCain; I haven't yet come to a firm conclusion on that question.
That being said, I addressed this letter to you as Hillary, not as Senator Clinton, because for this moment and this purpose only, I am speaking to you from my heart, as a fellow human being, as a spiritual sister -- as someone so like myself that I cannot help but feel a genuinely loving connection with you when I speak from this place.
Like you, I am a middle-aged caucasian woman, raised in the American heartland. Like you, I grew up with a dominating -- domineering? -- father, who was by far the strongest influence on who I became for the first few decades of my life.
Like you, the roots of my feminism lie in the internal contradictions of growing up female and being the eldest child of such a man -- being subject to his demands for perfection and excellence and ambition, while at the same time understanding that in the dominant worldview of that time and place -- which in some ways he personified -- being female meant being limited by traditional gender roles. Chafing at those roles, like you I decided at an early age not to allow my life to be defined by conventional views of gender; before I was even old enough to have anything that could be considered a real political consciousness, I knew I was a rebel on gender issues.
Like you, I grew up being the smartest person in any room that I happened to be in. Although my gender played a big part in my political consciousness, it was not the core of my personal identity. That core -- the one thing that defined me more than anything else, both internally and in the eyes of the other people in my life -- was my brain. Socially, I was awkward; it was my ideas and my intellectual skills that defined the parameters of my life.
I look at pictures of you in college and your early career days, and I see myself. The big glasses, the long and unstyled hair, the clothing that was defined by a quirky, slightly frumpy sense of self rather than by what was considered fashionable. I was a strong, unique, intelligent person, too far above and outside of traditional femininity to allow myself to bow to conventional notions of feminine style and beauty. (And if I were running for President today, I too would be wearing pants -- probably not exactly your signature pantsuits, but not slacks from the pages of fashion magazines, either.)
When I entered the professional world (I too started my career as a lawyer, after attending one of the nation's top law schools), another metric was added to those by which I measured my worth as a human being. Competence joined intelligence as a reference criterion. I, too, was always seen as the hardest-working person around, but the hard work was not in and of itself a value; it was valuable insofar as it was a necessary ingredient in ensuring competence in whatever I did. Because to be less than brilliantly competent -- or, even worse, to be SEEN as less than brilliantly competent -- was simply not an option. So whatever it took to maintain my competence is what I did.
Like you, I always felt that I had a mission in this world to help people that I saw as disadvantaged. This did not manifest iself in being a particularly generous, merciful or hospitable person on a one-on-one basis; rather I saw myself acting on a larger scale in my career and/or volunteer work. I was all about programs and organizations and political views that expressed compassion on a macro scale, even while on a micro scale there were those who saw me as too blunt, too harsh, too arrogant.
In my heart, I was none of those things. But my passions, my insistence on things being done in a way that was rational and fair and effective, sometimes resulted in my speaking with more vehemence than tact. While I do truly believe in the worth and dignity of EVERY human being, I have never been one to suffer fools gladly, especially if I'm on a team with them trying to achieve a shared goal.
Like you, I married a man who was both weaker than me and more of an "everyman" (everyperson) than I could ever hope to be. If we had been a political couple like you and Bill, I would have been the policy wonk, and he would have been the gladhanding guy that everyone wanted to have a beer with.
Like Bill, my husband owed much of his success to the wife whose ambition, and ability to set and achieve goals, far outpaced his own. Unlike Bill, my husband chose to leave me for another woman rather than stay married to me while sleeping around. (Just as an amusing side note, he despised Bill for the Lewinsky matter, and was extremely hurt when, upon discovering his adultery, I compared him to Bill.)
That one difference -- the fact that my husband divorced me -- is where the trajectories of my life and yours diverge, and it is the source of the things I want to say to you now.
When my husband told me he wanted a divorce, I reacted as millions of others in that situation have reacted. I felt as though my world had just shattered into a million pieces and lay in shards at my feet. I went into denial. I cried, argued, begged.
However, those characteristics that I described above, the ones that you and I share, caused my story to proceed somewhat differently from many similar stories. Remember, I was the strong one, the goal-setter, the hard worker, the one whose determination and intelligence had always enabled me to succeed. And just as my husband had never been the strong one in our marriage, he was not the strong one in our divorce, either.
True, he eventually won the battle, and I have been divorced for several years. But I did not go gentle into that good night. I began in denial, and I stayed in denial for three and a half years. During those years, I fought against the divorce with everything in me.
His leaving me represented rejection of me and, even more terrifying, it represented failure. And I simply could not allow myself to fail. That was not part of my self-image, or part of my worldview. The narratives by which I lived my life told me that this was simply a problem to be solved, a challenge to be overcome. I knew I could change his mind; I just had to find the right approach, the successful strategy, and I could make everything work out right.
And Hillary, I did women like you and me proud. The breadth and scope and variety of my attempted strategies was nothing short of breaththaking -- unequalled in the history of marriage in the Western World. I left absolutely no stone unturned. From Day One, he told me the marriage was over, and he did not WANT to find a a way to save it. But I knew he was misguided, and I just needed to find a way to help him see the light. I dedicated myself with single-minded devotion to winning him over, convincing him of the error of his ways, guilting him, seducing him, making emotional appeals that left him sobbing (but not changing his mind).
Are you seeing the parallel?
Here's the thing, Hillary. I knew that saving my marriage was the most important goal I had ever set for myself. And I knew that I simply would not be able to live with myself in the future if I didn't give absolutely everything I had to give, to try to make my goal a reality.
But eventually the day came when I could no longer continue the battle. When I knew that my efforts were futile, and that any further energy, money, or time that I put into that defunct goal not only would not help me achieve it, but would rob me of many things: self-respect, financial stabiity, the opportunity to turn the page and begin building my new life.
When that day came, I swallowed hard and ventured out into the scariest territory I had ever undertaken to traverse.
And that's what I really want to tell you about. Because all those people who are telling you to drop out, that it's over and you just need to give it up -- they don't know what they're asking of you. They act like it is a perfectly reasonable request to just ask you to step aside, just walk away from the most cherished dream of your heart. As though it were that simple, that easy. They don't have a clue what they're asking.
I know.
I know, I know, I know.
OK, there are a couple of differences. You have had this dream for SO many years. You helped Bill reach YOUR DREAM, accepting that your dream for yourself would have to be deferred. You put up with the humiliations he showered on you while he was living your dream. And maybe the biggest difference is that the loss of your dream is not a private affair as mine was; it is being played out on a world stage that I cannot even imagine appearing on.
But that doesn't change the essence of what I am saying. What I really want to tell you, and what I hope you can hear, is that you don't need to fear giving up the dream.
Yes, it will hurt. For a while, it will hurt like hell. But Hillary, you've survived hurt before, and you can survive it again. What I hope you can understand is what lies beyond the hurt.
Once I accepted that my marriage was over and stopped wasting my energy and imagination on fighting the inevitable, I was free to begin re-defining my life. MY life. I was free to discover who I am, and who I wanted to become, in a way I had never done before. It was as though I had rediscovered the hope and freedom and optimism of adolescence, but with the wisdom and knowledge and experience of four and a half decades of life to draw from. It has been a more fascinating and surprising journey than I could possibly have imagined.
I can't even begin to predict any specifics of what re-making yourself might look like. What I do know is that discarding any long-held framework that defines your life opens up infinite possibilities for re-framing. Senate Majority Leader? Peace Corp Volunteer? Administering a $100 million dollar (or, hell, think big -- with Bill's fundraising skills you could shoot for a billion dollars) Clinton Foundation that could impact the world in even more profound ways than a Hillary Clinton presidency might have done? Elder stateswoman a la Jimmy Carter? Re-defining the education of young women in developing countries -- Oprah's school on a much larger scale? Heading up a national or global initiative to foster school readiness for children age birth-to-three -- the Al Gore of early childhood education?
My God, with your money, your skills, and your prominence the possibilities are LITERALLY unlimited. How would it feel to have the freedom to choose whatever way you want to impact the world, and have the resources to know that you can make your choice a reality?
Hillary, today really is the first day of the rest of your life. Don't waste it fighting ugly battles to hold on to a dead past. Embrace the future -- embrace YOUR future. The sky's the limit.
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