Hillary explains her email server indiscretion (after being infected with the Psycha virus)

Has any one of you never taken home a square of Post-It Notes or a postage stamp or paper clip from your office? Has anyone here never had negative thoughts about your boss while continuing to work for him or her in a good-natured and productive way?

Is there anyone who could say that their professional character mirror-image reflects their deeper self? That their private reality and inner engine – in its complexity, its rip currents dark and light, mature and regressive, wise and childish, kind and indifferent – is identical to their public persona? Can anyone swear that their psyche is precisely what fairness and civility, social morality and justice, political correctness and perfect health dictate?

No honest person will swear that the most dangerous responsibilities and highest callings – priest or president, CEO or parent – transform the flawed human self that we all are. No one can claim that having an ideal makes us a Platonic ideal, existing other-worldly in perfection. We are the molecular mess, a history of roots grown in darkness and undiscoverable things, of childhood bent by other people’s power and blindness over us. Like you, I am a “molecular” person.

There is one way in which our true self conforms to our career. A depressed woman will be drawn to underemployment. A victimized and angry teenager may choose, without admitting it, a career with intimidating and cruel power. An anxious person may go to a people-pleasing or people-avoiding job. Those of us who enter the ironical world of power altruism, of self-aggrandizing public service (it’s hard to know how to depict humanitarian work whose other face is power, wealth and prestige) probably come out of a childhood that was co-opted by ideas and crusades that were not ours, but instead our parents’ and their neurotic axes to grind. We learned, we became other-focus while our own needs to just be a kid – a loved kid – were ignored. I’ve often talked about my mother’s enduring lesson – sending a little girl out the door to face the bullies on her own. On the surface this was noble and a template for my future. But inside, the cauldron where our life is forged, it was abuse. It was my mother’s detachment, projection, abandonment and warped motivations, distracted and sweetened by her zeal. It was no lesson for a child! – to be ejected from home to a brutal world and made to think and sink or swim like an adult, be her own protector. My father, too, was “tough love” along with his beatings.* He taught me that I – a girl – could do anything, be anything. Except a safe and cherished child.

We become blind adults driven by old poisons, believing we are doing the driving and that the poisons are principles. We drive our way to sleek offices and grand titles, to power and good works. We’d love to think we are this person. But instead, we are real, and our private self – the volcanic forces beneath the island – still plays inside us. It has always needed what was never given: Quiet and peaceful silence, safe privacy, freedom to finally be our self apart from the seeing, shaming, expecting world. Probably it needs secrecy. Enjoyment. To be loved and accepted for who we are especially when we are bad. Time in nature and alone without pressure. We all have this inside us – the trapped latent child – and no calling or dream can ever stop it. We also have the absurdity that feels others must do their job and fulfill their obligations in exemplary fashion, while we can be imperfect.

I kept my emails to myself. It felt private and safe, something for me that was not in the glare of the bad parents of the world, that was not of the programmed “good” adult my mother and father prematurely cultivated. The server was discovered. And now the vital energy behind it will go back into hiding and become like everyone else who is a real soul, with needs for peace and privacy, beneath their cover.

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* See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/us/politics/hillary-clinton-draws-scrappy-determination-from-a-tough-combative-father.html?_r=0.