I spoke a grand total of zero words in kindergarten. Instead, I did a lot of listening, trying to understand how the world outside my home worked. I never talked with my friends, so most of my friends were loud, brash straightshooters who made their opinions known to me, everything from the age-old Pokemon vs. Yu-Gi-Oh! debate to politics. I never responded. Part of that was just pure shyness, but another part of me didn’t want people to know what I truly felt (I honestly didn’t have a horse in the Pokemon vs. Yu-Gi-Oh! race, and my opinions on politics in kindergarten were slightly different than most of the other kids). But I stood there, gamely, nodding my head if anyone ever asked me if I was listening and whispered literal sweet nothings into their ears if they ever asked for my opinion.

Growing up, I always was told that Hillary Clinton was the “ultraliberal extreme version of Bill,” and when she ran for president the first time in 2008, I saw a power-hungry woman who wanted to enact her extremist agenda on everyone. And throughout the primary season this time out, she was the agent of the corrupt political establishment who took money from large corporate donors and record of seemingly endless scandal. But Ezra Klein’s profile of Sec. Clinton for Vox helped me to see her in a different light. She had engaged in a listening tour on both her senatorial campaign and 2016 presidential campaign to hear from a variety of constituents, taking the time to understand what issues were important. The Hillary that insiders in Washington knew is not the one I grew up hearing about - this one was kind and tough, making friends and creating policy with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, remembering little facts about policy reports that no one else would and attempting to organize and compartmentalize everything.

There was always a palpable fear of failing to please. When I was in fourth grade, my friend and I started a magazine and wrote an article making fun of my fourth grade teacher. After Mr. Blake called us out for an entire class period, I started rationalizing and spinning the article as something PRAISING him because I was so eager to be liked again. With making friends in middle school, I made friends because people knew I could be a good listener. I kept things to myself so they’d get most of the time and I could be liked. Communication became a game, one in which I would throw out passive-aggressive answers at the wall and get angry when no one would guess them correctly. In high school, I stood updated on high school drama and information by listening and affirming the speaker, while trying to balance my tangled web of connections. After all, I could never be on the wrong side of things if I was on every side. So I identified with Sec. Clinton when she claimed in one of her paid speeches, “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” As I continued to grow and become more interested in a variety of issues, the amount of knowledge soon became overwhelming and I wasn’t able to discern which was right and which was wrong. How could I identify with a particular side and screech for it when I simply didn’t know and couldn’t decide? Sometimes, even a simple thing like deciding whether to post something on social media or not gets me anxious. What does this say about who I am? Will this turn off my friends who don't feel this way? Will they still like me? Questions of self-esteem and self-image continued to fall.

In leaked audio released from a fundraiser earlier this year, Clinton stated, “So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there. Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is - I don’t want to overpraise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.” Clinton grew spiteful of the press and her at least semi-true belief that the press looks for scandal and drama instead of substance, analyzing her attire or manner of speech instead of her policy platforms that she gave up, refusing to hold press conferences for long periods of time and taking expensive paid gigs at Goldman Sachs giving speeches. I came back this summer from a culture different from my own, studying abroad in Hong Kong around people that didn’t seem to care about each other, but whatever was fastest or the best for them - and they seemed to be doing just fine. At odds with my own faith and sense of morality, why the hell couldn’t I as well?

I say all of this not to excuse any actions Sec. Clinton may have performed that were wrong. I write this because so often public figures are mythologized into what we make of them. We build them up into comic heroes and tragic villains who must be lionized or tore down at the altar of public opinion. The “other side” becomes a Dark Side with no room for compromise and all the room for hate and disgust, building up with personalized Facebook timelines and like-minded friends. Hillary is many things, but she is not the Devil. Frankly, she’s a crazy optimistic, organized, pragmatic, moderate realist with idealistic principles. She is in part disillusioned and cynical of the system but excited to attempt to create positive social change in the world. Her faith affects this drive to make people’s lives better, and she both loves people and is terrified of them at the same time, wanting to please everybody and knowing she cannot. She is flawed, but still strives toward these goals, regardless of the pain she inflicts on herself from her distrust of how other people will perceive her as well as the taunts and straight-up lies that mar her career and campaign.

In other words, she is me.

A few days ago, activist Margot Gerster was walking in the woods near her house when she happened to run into none other than Hillary. In the picture she posted to social media, Sec. Clinton is not wearing makeup. She is dressed in a warm black jacket and walking her dog. There’s truly no more need for a persona. Maybe for once, there can just be Hillary, no need to worry about how to compose a tweet or if her expression on her face doesn’t look too grumpy in the frame of the camera lens, picking herself up off the dead, jagged leaves and marching right back into those woods.

Maybe for once, there can just be me.

Maybe someday, there can just be us.