So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(6)

If he is defeated, we have the chance to begin the long, difficult process of trying to regain international trust and respect. It will take a strong, principled, and visionary leader who understands the stakes to do so. He or she will need to persuade the world that the last four years were an aberration and that America is back and wants to earn the world’s respect again. I think we can do it if we elect the right leader with real international knowledge and experience, but even for the best successor, it will be very challenging.

When we went to the Vatican together, I remember you were not stoked to wear the mantilla. Why? When you’re traveling, how do you show respect for other cultures while being true to your values?

Truthfully, I am not keen on having to wear religiously mandated garb of any sort or to cover myself in a manner reserved for women. That’s just my personal view. But as a diplomat, I understand the necessity of showing respect for other cultures and faiths. So I suck it up and wear it when I must but avoid it when I can. I did it at the Vatican and have worn a loose scarf around part of my head when necessary in certain mosques. But I don’t have to be happy about it.

What advice would you give to young women who want to work in foreign service?

First of all, I strongly encourage young women to go into public service generally, and the foreign service in particular. Our nation needs its best talent to serve the greater good, and working in key roles in government can be extremely rewarding and important.

Second, you need to be well-prepared. Get an advanced degree (at least a master’s, if you can). Travel abroad. Learn one or more foreign languages. Get some quantitative skills. Consider joining the Peace Corps. Test your limits, stretch yourself, get out of your comfort zone.

Finally, do what you are passionate about—not what your parents or your teachers or anyone else wants you to do. Do what will make you get out of bed in the morning with pep in your step. And try to find somebody worthy to share the journey with you.

Good luck, and have fun!





Shits, Giggles, and Medical Marijuana



Rule #1 of publishing a book: Never read the Amazon reviews. Even when they’re pretty good—average 4.1 stars!!!—looking at them is a drag. Everyone knows that you need twenty enthusiastic compliments to counteract the force of one slightly, possibly passive-aggressive mention of the bad hair decision you made when you were twenty-three, and that’s under ideal circumstances. Amazon reviewers tend to be less generous than your aunt Glenda at Thanksgiving, who seems to think your beauty never quite recovered from that perm.

So, before you lecture me on what’s good for my mental health, I just want to say I know. But on the scale of difficult things, avoiding Amazon reviews of a book you’ve written falls somewhere between “not eating the entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting” and quantum physics. It requires the willpower of one of those really austere kinds of monks. Instead of a vow of silence, you have taken a vow not to type your own name into your search bar. Maybe it’ll be different for this book, like how parents are progressively less involved with each subsequent kid. Book one gets obsessive Amazon scanning, book two gets the occasional update on rankings, book three just gets hand-me-downs. Mom’s busy watching Netflix!

The main thing I’ve taken away from reading Amazon reviews that I shouldn’t have read is that, for some reason, not everyone wants to hear about my unpredictable bowel movements. They were the pesky villains of my previous book, popping up when I least expected them to thwart my plans of dazzling the pope.

“We came here for gossip about whether Barack Obama still smokes sometimes,” the Amazon reviewers cried, “not for endless anecdotes about some random lady’s IBS!”

“Gross!”

“#TMI!”

All fair points. But would these readers be singing a different tune if they learned that being open about my struggle had earned me an invitation to speak at the 2017 IBS Awareness Summit in New York hosted by Wendy Williams?!

Probably not. Pooping—yes, I said it—is one of the last major taboos in our culture, and as with all taboos, that goes double for women, so people will probably be freaking out about it for a long time. As a woman, and one who has held various positions of power that are seen as serious and important, I thought of my discussion of my overactive intestines as a way to help lessen that stigma. (For every commenter noting how unladylike it is to discuss one’s bowel movements, I would get a DM or email thanking me for talking about it.) I would rather not have to use the bathroom at all, but here we are. Maybe when the human race has fully transitioned into AI we’ll be able to phase out shitting.

All this is to say: I’m about to talk about my IBS again! In much more detail than before. So if you’re one of these reviewers, or someone who doesn’t appreciate knowing the details of strangers’ gastrointestinal lives (weird…), I suggest you skip to the next essay, which is about the much less gross topic of periods.

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I’ve always had a finicky stomach, but things really became noticeable on the Kerry campaign in 2004. I was dating Doug,1 who also worked on the campaign and whom I’d been with for a few years. (Just so you know I’m not talking about diarrhea with some random hookup—I always saved that until at least date four.) Whenever I’d go on the road with Kerry, I’d talk to Doug about how bad my stomach was acting—like it was somehow separate from me. Doug would always say the same thing—that what I was describing was not normal, that I should go to the doctor—and I would always reply with the same thing: “No, no, I think I’m just lactose intolerant!” You’d think that when swapping milk with Lactaid had no effect on the number of panicked trips I took to the bathroom I would have realized dairy was not my problem, but no. So in addition to drinking Lactaid like the company had sponsored me on Instagram (before Instagram existed) I chugged Pepto-Bismol and popped Imodium, which just gave me the opposite problem at about the same intensity. I had great health insurance, but I kept putting off going to the doctor because I didn’t want to have a disease—and particularly a disease that might make you shit your pants in front of friends, colleagues, and international luminaries.