Williamson leans back into her chair, lovely cheekbones jutting over the lower planes of her face. Her chin angles away, dropping a Melania-quality side-bang over one eye and leaving the other to narrow. Black-blazered arms cross in front of a white silk blouse. She opens her mouth and, in a voice like a powder brush dusting harp strings, begins miracle-working.
"Where there is light, there cannot be darkness," Williamson says. "And where there's love, there cannot be fear." I smile knowingly. In the past few weeks, I've read enough of Williamson's canon to be extremely familiar with this sentiment. All right, I think. Let's get to the miracle. Then Williamson begins berating me. "I think it behooves us to remember that those who walked across the bridge in Selma surely were traumatized," she says, in an ASMR murmur. Her scold feels like a scalp massage. "Surely the women's suffragettes were deeply traumatized and angry." I'm nodding, hypnotized by her certainty in my inadequacy. Yes, Marianne, I have neglected to contextualize my suffering! "American women are not porcelain dolls," she says pointedly. "This is a serious moment. It is a crisis. A crisis is never convenient."
Williamson's volume climbs and her pitch drops as she reaches the climax. "Too many people now are lost in their negative feelings about what's going on in our own little personal silo," she says, gesturing to my own little personal silo. "That's what makes the fear and the anger so debilitating. If we want to change our lives, we have to ask ourselves, deeply, what part we played. If I don't tend to my marriage, I'm going to lose my marriage. If we don't tend to our democracy, there are others who will more than happily take up the space. We [need to] realize, 'No, I'll show up for this, [as] other generations have shown up.' "
