She Said Something Was Wrong
I have a theory about why women are so triggered by Lindsay Clancy, and I don't think it's really about whether we believe she was guilty or innocent, mentally ill, remorseful, or punished sufficiently. What happened is almost impossible to comprehend. A mother killed her three children. It is horrific, devastating, and there is no version of this conversation that minimizes the enormity of that.
But when I listen to women talk about this case, there is one part of the story they keep coming back and that is that she said something was wrong.
She knew she wasn't okay. She sought help. She saw doctors, tried medications, went to the hospital and told people close to her that she was struggling. We aren't relating to what Lindsay did. We're reacting to something that happened before it: the experience of knowing something is very wrong with you, trying to communicate it, and wondering whether anyone truly understands how much you mean it.
Of course, for most of us, something is wrong exists on an entirely different scale. It's the feeling that something in your body isn't right. Something in your relationship isn't right. Your job is draining something out of you. You're starting to worry about the way you're drinking or eating. You don't feel like yourself anymore. You try to explain it, sometimes more than once, and somehow end up wondering whether you're making too much of it.
Maybe you're tired. Maybe you're hormonal. Maybe you're anxious. Maybe you're overthinking. Maybe every relationship gets hard. Maybe everyone hates their job sometimes. Maybe you're being sensitive. There always seems to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why what we're feeling isn't quite as significant as it feels to us. And after hearing enough of those explanations, eventually we become pretty good at giving them to ourselves.
When Did We Learn Not to Trust Ourselves?
I think we learn some version of this much earlier than we realize. Be a good girl. Don't make a scene. Don't hurt her feelings. You committed, so finish it. Don't be dramatic. Don't be difficult. Don't be too emotional. Somewhere along the way, many of us learn that discomfort isn't necessarily information. Sometimes it's something we're expected to push through quietly so that nobody else has to be inconvenienced by it.
None of this requires terrible parents or some enormous childhood trauma. That's almost the point. These messages can exist inside perfectly loving families, good schools and normal friendships. A girl says she doesn't want to go somewhere and an adult tells her she'll have fun once she gets there. She says someone makes her uncomfortable and she's encouraged to be polite. She says she's being bullied and someone tells her not to let those girls get to her. She starts obsessing over food and everyone tells her how thin she looks. In a thousand tiny ways, we learn to question the first signal coming from inside ourselves.
Then we become adults and get much more sophisticated about it. Something feels off in a relationship, but maybe we're avoidant. The job is making us miserable, but maybe we're not resilient enough. We don't like who we become when we drink, but we don't have a “real” drinking problem. We're lonely, but maybe we just need to learn to love ourselves. We're anxious, but perhaps we need to regulate our nervous system. We have acquired an extraordinary vocabulary for understanding ourselves, but sometimes I wonder whether all of that self-awareness has also made us incredibly sophisticated at talking ourselves out of what we know.
The Impossible Job of Being Fine
There is also the slightly absurd reality of being a woman right now. We're told we're too much while simultaneously being expected to handle too much. Have a career. Make money. Maintain your friendships and relationships. Take care of your body. Manage your hormones. Heal your childhood wounds. Exercise. Eat enough protein. Sleep eight hours. Have boundaries. Stay informed. Answer your texts. Be independent, but know how to receive. Be ambitious, but don't let your ambition consume you. Be emotionally intelligent, but for God's sake don't be too emotional.
Does anybody else still have that Barbie speech permanently lodged in her brain? Because apparently the joke was that it was exaggerated, except I remember watching it and thinking, Yes, actually. That sounds about right.
We have become so good at functioning inside all of this that our ability to function can almost work against us. You can be answering emails, showing up to meetings, working out, making dinner plans, remembering birthdays and looking completely put together while internally feeling like you are barely holding onto yourself. Women can be in a state of genuinely high-level hypervigilance while remaining frighteningly competent, and competence has a funny way of convincing everyone, including us, that we must be fine.
But What If “Something Is Wrong” Is Enough?
I experienced a version of this recently when I went to a doctor because I wasn't feeling like myself. I was anxious and exhausted, but I was also under significant work stress, dealing with other health issues and, somewhat relevantly, a woman in my forties. Before there was much exploration of whether hormones, burnout, my health, my circumstances, or some unholy cocktail of all four might be involved, I had a prescription for Lexapro in my hand.
The medication isn't really the point. What stayed with me was how quickly something doesn't feel right became a problem to solve rather than a reason to get curious. I didn't need someone to automatically agree with my interpretation of what was happening. I wanted someone to wonder with me about why I felt the way I did.
And doctors aren't really the point either. We do this to our girlfriends. We do it to our sisters. We do it to each other, usually because we're trying to help. A girlfriend says she doesn't think her relationship is right and we remind her what a great guy he is. She says she's worried about how much she's drinking and we tell her everyone is drinking too much. She hates her job and we remind her how lucky she is to have it. She says she doesn't feel like herself and within thirty seconds we're recommending a therapist, a hormone doctor, a supplement, or the podcast episode that changed our life.
We rush toward solutions because we love each other. But sometimes solving is another way of not listening. Sometimes the woman sitting across from us doesn't need us to make what she's feeling disappear. She needs someone to stay there long enough to understand what she's actually trying to say.
The Part of Lindsay’s Story I Can’t Stop Thinking About
This is where I keep coming back to Lindsay. Before Lindsay Clancy became the woman at the center of a murder trial, she was a woman trying to get help. She saw mental-health professionals. She took medications. She sought emergency care. She was hospitalized. She told people close to her she wasn't okay. The details of what she disclosed, to whom, and when matter enormously in a courtroom. But that isn't the conversation I'm trying to have.
I'm interested in why women hear that part of her story and seem to react so viscerally to it. I think it's because we've spent our lives being told to speak up while simultaneously being rewarded for being easy. Ask for help, but don't be needy. Have boundaries, but don't be difficult. Advocate for yourself, but don't be aggressive. Be emotionally available, but don't be too emotional. Be ambitious, but don't let your ambition make anyone uncomfortable. Take care of everyone, but don't become resentful. Whatever you do, don't be too much.
Maybe women aren't too much. Maybe we're carrying too much and then being asked to communicate our distress about carrying too much in a calm, pleasant and appropriately measured tone. We become very good at reading everyone else while remaining strangely unsure of ourselves. We can identify the emotional temperature of a room within thirty seconds and then spend six months debating whether we're actually unhappy.
Maybe We Need to Listen Differently
This is where I think the Lindsay Clancy conversation can give us something beyond another horrible story to consume. Maybe the takeaway isn't simply that other people need to listen to women better. Maybe we need to become better at listening to each other, and at helping another woman hear herself before she has collected enough evidence to prove that what she's feeling is real.
If a girlfriend keeps bringing up the same relationship, job, habit, fear or feeling, maybe repetition is information. Instead of immediately reassuring her, fixing it, or telling her what we think she should do, maybe we stay curious for another minute. What keeps bothering you about this? What do you think you're afraid to admit? What would you say if you weren't worried about disappointing anyone? Sometimes the most important thing one woman can do for another isn't tell her what to do. It's help her hear herself.
And perhaps that is the small piece of ourselves women are recognizing in a story as extreme as Lindsay Clancy's. Not her actions, not her circumstances and certainly not the unimaginable ending. It's what came before: the experience of knowing something isn't right and trying to find the words that will make somebody understand how much you mean it.
Most of us will never experience anything remotely resembling what happened in that house, but almost every woman I know has had some version of something doesn't feel right. Maybe it was the relationship, the job, the drinking, the eating, the body, the anxiety, the loneliness, or simply the strange realization that you've built a life that looks perfectly good from the outside and somehow doesn't feel like yours anymore.
Maybe we don't need to treat every uncomfortable feeling like an emergency. But we also shouldn't need an emergency before we decide a feeling deserves our attention. We can get curious sooner. We can believe each other sooner. We can stop requiring ourselves and the women we love to build an airtight case for why something feels wrong before we're willing to listen.
Because maybe the question isn't how much louder a woman has to get before somebody finally hears her. It's whether we can become better at hearing each other, and ourselves, before she ever has to get that loud.
