Why I may seem ‘aloof’ or ‘unemotional’: Hillary Clinton opens up to Humans of New York

Hillary Rodham Clinton has had one of the most slugfest-filled paths to the US Presidential candidacy. After losing her slugfest to Barack Obama in 2008, she has now prevailed over Bernie Sanders. And it has come at the cost of criticism that her speeches seem ‘too prepared’ or that she has seemed ‘too plastic’ and that these mean she is ‘not genuine’. In twin posts on the Facebook page of Humans of New York, Hillary addressed that in a direct yet poignant way.
Both of the posts on Hillary focus on critical and very real gender issues, demonstrating not just the tough path that she has to travel to the Presidential ticket, but also some lopsided reasoning and prejudice she still faces, despite being best placed to inherit the Oval Office.
“I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not Bill Clinton. Both of them carry themselves with a naturalness that is very appealing to audiences. But I’m married to one and I’ve worked for the other, so I know how hard they work at being natural. It's not that they're trying to be somebody else. But it's hard work to present yourself in the best possible way.” begins one of the posts on Hillary.
“You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens. It’s not bad. It’s just a fact. It’s really quite funny,” says Hillary.
She goes on to talk about events where male speakers before her take up issues at a high pitch. “And I want to do the same thing. Because I care about this stuff. But I’ve learned that I can’t be quite so passionate in my presentation. I love to wave my arms, but apparently that’s a little bit scary to people. And I can’t yell too much. It comes across as ‘too loud’ or ‘too shrill’ or ‘too this’ or ‘too that’,” Hillary says.
Behind the will to tread every tough path is a difficult experience or a heavy thought process. And Hillary offers a rare window into the genesis of her own drive to push through with her glass-ceiling-breaking run for biggest house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
She recalls when she took the admission exam to the Harvard Law School in a big hall, where she was among few women. “while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on’,” she said, recalling one man telling her that if she took his place at the law school, he would get drafted to the army and sent to Vietnam, where he would surely die.
Hillary explains how she stood her ground against such emotional warfare. “It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off’,” she says.
And she links this experience and her need to learn a defence mechanism against it to criticism that she has faced on the campaign trail that she is ‘aloof’ or ‘unemotional’. “… if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family,” she says.
And that in itself is damning criticism of the political field and the media limelight she has had to traverse to get to the Presidential ticket. And she finishes the story with true swag, saying, “But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that”
The two posts together have received over 1,00,000 ‘likes’ and have been ‘shared’ over 210,000 times.
But the real winner in terms of the reaction was the comments section of the posts. In this troll-age of acid comments, the reaction to Hillary’s post points at one thing – that he has managed to do what she spoke about in the posts themselves: communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’
Here are some of the reactions, many of which have themselves been ‘liked’ or ‘shared’ tens of thousands of times:

And that’s how you bring a million people to a civil rights debate.