It’s a process for me to figure out—what are self-destructive behaviors that come in the wake of all this trauma, versus what are healthy coping ones? I don’t know why during your life you go through things—and I think there’s got to be a reason behind it, and that’s the only way I’ve been able to cope with it all. Learning about this forced Hill to reckon with their relationship and what it meant that her grandfather had a history of abuse, just like her own ex.“As I was writing, to me it just became so clear that there was this complex human dynamic where it doesn’t erase the fact that someone was so important to you, it doesn’t erase whatever has been meaningful in your relationship or what they’ve done in their lives, but they can be flawed and they can have done terrible things to people,” she told me. It turned out, though, that her grandfather was a much more complicated figure than the hero she’d always seen him as. And she does get vulnerable: Not only is she unflinching in her descriptions of the painful, guilt-ridden days after her public resignation, but she is also open in discussing moments of suicidal ideation, years of abuse, and other viscerally painful experiences.Even though she says that writing this book felt triumphant and cathartic, Hill is candid about the fact that she still struggles with the aftermath of years of trauma. And I’m hoping we can get that to become a movement.The biggest thing I learned from it is that when I started to campaign, it truly felt like a movement and these people were my friends. Now She’s Telling Her Story The former congresswoman talks rebuilding … Hill says the photos, some of which were taken without her knowledge, could have only come from her then husband, who she says threatened to “ruin” her if she left him.
Still, she was furious and humiliated. You have to set your clear boundaries from the beginning.
The reasoning behind that is that you get a fear, really quick, it gets instilled in you, and it kind of becomes unbreakable if you don’t immediately get back on. However, even as her professional life was flourishing, Hill’s personal life was spinning out of control.
She was the boss. She apologized, but there was no taking it back. “It’s something that takes continual work and I think anyone who’s been through trauma, whatever kind it might be, knows that all too well,” Hill, who is in therapy, told me. Back home in California, her relationship with her husband, Kenny Heslep, had started unraveling as he became increasingly abusive, erupting in frequent angry outbursts, monitoring her whereabouts and phone calls, and even walking around with a loaded gun during their fights. It’s like you’re climbing out of a canyon and you’re trying to find the most efficient way out, and also knowing that there’s danger in coming out too fast, but also you’ve got this really strong desire to get out as fast as you can. You don’t know that she identifies with a Hill had a meteoric rise and an even faster fall: She was a former community college student who became the leader of a major nonprofit, then launched and won a seemingly impossible run for Congress in a deep-red district by the time she was 31.
With HER Time, the PAC that I started, the overarching goal is to be able to elect women and then push forward this agenda. She eventually decided that the only way to make things right would be to Hill’s detractors — an online horde of misogynist trolls, Republicans interested in her House seat, and, of course, her ex — undoubtedly wanted her to run away in shame after her resignation, never to be heard from again. Ms. Hill, 32, was trying to record an interview with Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary for President Barack Obama who had been an adviser to … Now the rebuilding part is slower.