The United States Democratic presidential nominee appeared in two blog posts, both of which feature a photo of her sitting on a wooden chair inside an unknown room. The photos were accompanied with long quotes from a deeply personal interview.
"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," Mrs Clinton said.
The first blog post details a time while the Democrat was a senior studying law at Harvard, when classmates tried to bully her out of taking a test.
“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,’" Mrs Clinton described.
“One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I'll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. 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.”
The former Secretary of State and First Lady, and now frontrunner in the race to the White House, said experiences like that one forced her to become very protective of herself.
“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,’" Mrs Clinton said.
She added that she can’t blame people for perceiving her as cold.
“Sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And 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.”
“It's hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman,” she reflected.
“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.”
Mrs Clinton added she’s also learned to tone done her passion when presenting.
“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.’ Which is funny, because I’m always convinced that the people in the front row are loving it,” she said.
The posts amassed almost 650,000 likes within six hours after the first story was shared.
