The Bat Cave
My latest new hobby is to run on the treadmill while listening to the podcast Conversations with Tyler. The activity is both physically and mentally refreshing. Cowen’s podcast lets me be a fly on the wall during his interviews with brilliant people from diverse backdrops and disciplines. Most of the time, I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I think the exposure is valuable nonetheless. Recently I was listening to Tyler’s conversation with Samantha Powers, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Something, in particular, that Powers said stood out as reassuring. She talked about the bat cave in her head, the flurry of insecurities that came up on the job as Ambassador. It’s not every day that you hear a brilliant person discuss their personal challenges candidly. Why don’t more people do that? I, for one, have bats flying around in my head all the time. I love how she says that’s what it’s like to grow up. It’s tempting to fantasize of a less challenging path, instead of owning my own business, where making decisions would be easier (they’d be made for me). I think I’d better learn to deal with the bats.
COWEN: There’s some fairly personal elements to your story. You talk about going to therapy. You talk about the kind of men you dated and what that meant for your life. Were you on the margin of putting more of that in or less of it in? Did you have second thoughts?
POWER: [laughs] I mentioned my sort of meta purpose, which of course evolved as I’ve written the book and become clearer to me than right when I started. But what I saw, I think, in teaching, when I came back to teaching after being a member of President Obama’s cabinet and being in this incredibly blessed position that I was in, was somehow I was now other.
I was somebody who had been a senior official, and I had my act together. Clearly, I must have had my act together, or how could I have been representing the United States at the United Nations? Very much in the same way that I would have seen a Madeleine Albright or a Jeane Kirkpatrick when I was a kid — these iconic women who are out there, standing up to Russia.
That can be very appealing, and some students will come up to me and say, “I want to be America’s ambassador to the UN. How do I go about doing it?” And I’ll say, “Well, not that way, probably.” Because if you focus on the title rather than what you want to do in the world, you’re probably not going to get very far. But some people are drawn to power, to the position or whatever.
I get that, and I want to work with those students, too. But many just think, “I want to try to make a difference, but I don’t know that I could ever be that person. I don’t have my act together to that extent. I don’t have that kind of conviction.”
So the reason I include the personal, and especially the material about self-doubt and about what I call the bat cave, which is my head at times, where the bats are swirling around: “Can I do this?” and “Have I gone too far?” and “Did I go on too long in that meeting with President Obama?” This sort of self-recrimination.
By opening that up, I want young people to know that whatever doubts they’re experiencing, whatever their romantic foibles, that’s what it looks like to grow up. Sometimes you grow up in the public eye. Sometimes you grow up in the confines of your own relationships and your own family and your own home. And I did a bit of both. The idea that my public persona would somehow cause young people to think that I was some other species of person — I did not want that to happen.
Source: “Samantha Power.” Conversations with Tyler, conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/samantha-power/.