By Acclamation

Yesterday, I spent the day in Chicago interviewing professional women softball players for Catch. I had the honor of hearing their stories. While each was different, there was one, inescapable theme: sports had given them a place where they could be themselves, without apology.

Tonight, I watched an historic event as Secretary Clinton became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

The messages that I heard from the athletes and from myriad women on the stage at the convention are forever tied together for me. A line of demarcation. It’s a strange phenomenon to be so close to these stories, and yet so removed. I understand them, but they are not mine. This has not ever been my fight.

Like me, I don’t believe those who came of age in the last twenty years truly understand the seismic shift that has occurred. Our world now has more spaces like those that the athletes talked about. We take for granted that they are here. They exist, and so it’s easy to think they must always have existed.

But they haven’t always existed. And there weren’t easily created. And that can only be understood by listening to the stories from those who lived through it.