We have more to process
Nicole shares her experience going through, and reflecting on, the resignation of former mayor Megan Barry.
The first few weeks Nicole (ahem @startleseasily) and I started talking about Metro and Nashville’s political climate, she brought up Megan Barry in nearly every conversation. With a few years of distance, it’s time to revisit Jan 31 - March 6, 2018, a period defined by breaking headlines that caused a kind of news whiplash, with significant chunks of unprocessed thoughts, opinions, and memories. Another piece about Barry’s tenure as mayor and resignation will be out in a few days.
I’ve been thinking about Megan Barry a lot lately. I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s my recent focus on the failings of Mayor John Cooper, maybe it’s her newfound friendship with comedian Josh Black, maybe it’s just that I’m getting older and reflecting on events from the past as the end of another year rapidly approaches. For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about Megan Barry a lot lately.
I don’t know Megan Barry. I didn’t vote for Megan Barry — in fact, I didn’t vote in a single local election until 2018. I met her once, while I was giving a presentation to a task force she had established.
I remember a few things about meeting Megan:
She was incredibly attentive. Her staff kept coming into the room trying to pull her away for another meeting, but she stayed. She listened intently. She asked questions, and not in a “I’m humoring you” way, but in a “I genuinely want to know more” way.
She had a sort of warmth and openness about her that you don’t see often in politics. She infused the room with an infectious lightness and joy.
She was intensely charismatic. Or maybe magnetic is a better word. There was an energy about her that’s hard to describe and harder to find.
Given my lack of interest in local politics, and my lack of personal connection to the Mayor herself, I didn’t expect the news to hit me like it did. I was working for Metro at the time, but I wasn’t concerned with the broader political landscape in Nashville. So when my boss texted the team one evening to warn us that news of an affair would be breaking soon, I didn’t expect to feel much of anything. I couldn’t have predicted that I would cry watching her admit to the affair and offer a public apology on a stage alone, with no podium to hold onto, no notes to read from, no one by her side. I never dreamed that it would take me almost four years to start to unpack why I was so unexpectedly emotional over this politician with whom I had no relationship.
But Megan came into my life at a point when I was coming into my own as a woman, a professional, and someone who cares deeply about what goes on in my city. Of course I idolized her; she was a woman in her political prime, making a name for herself on a national stage. Confident and sure of herself, she was the type of woman I hoped I could be one day. So when she fell, a part of me fell with her.
I’ve gone through fits and starts trying to write about this chapter in Nashville’s political history. I didn’t set out to write this. In fact, I don’t even think I was aware that there was anything to write about. But good friends have a way of picking up on the things you’ve been subconsciously mulling over, like how your brain processes your experiences through dreams, reflecting events you might’ve found insignificant at the time. And a good friend of mine did just that; after hearing me mention Megan’s resignation two or three times over the course of less than a week, this friend was like, “Yeah, you’ve been talking about Megan a lot lately...maybe that’s worth exploring.” (Thank you, friend.)
I never actually confronted how the news of Megan’s affair and subsequent resignation affected me. I never really processed it. I don’t think Nashville did, either. We all just sort of...moved on, at the encouragement of public figures and public voices. And, as anyone who’s had any amount of therapy will tell you, that’s not healthy.
So, writing this has been emotional. Uncomfortable, even. When Megan accepted the plea deal and admitted to theft, it felt like a personal affront, like she had let me down. And it’s no wonder I felt that way; the entire media ecosystem was beating that very drum. She betrayed us. Looking back at the way the news was covered by every major outlet in town, my response, which I thought was an organic reaction borne of my own personal heartache, was shaped and formed by the media I was reading. My initial reaction to what happened maybe wasn’t mine at all. And that’s uncomfortable, realizing your feelings aren’t your own.
Unless you live in some sort of subterranean bunker with no communication with the outside world, your thoughts and feelings are shaped by what you read, listen to, watch, the company you keep. And you accept that, as part of a society, you will be shaped by that society. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we all think that we craft our opinions and beliefs independent of these influences. “Yes, I certainly take into account what I’ve heard and read and seen,” we say to ourselves, “but ultimately I form my own opinions.”
When we are forced to reckon with this gap between what we feel inside and what we might perceive to be the “right” way to feel, based on those around us, it can be incredibly destabilizing. That’s what it felt like living through February 2018, seeing Barry prosecuted in the court of public opinion. That’s how this experience has made me feel — destabilized. Confused. Alone.
With almost four years of distance, I want to acknowledge the fullness of what happened, how Barry was treated, why she was treated that way, and the cost we paid as a city for her resignation. The political cost, the emotional cost, the way it affected all of us. How did this whole thing go down? And who decided it had to go down like that?
We’ve done our best to piece together a narrative that we feel reflects this critical moment in Nashville’s history and all the ways we live downstream of it. Barry made serious, repeated ethical breaches that crossed personal and professional lines. Our examination is not meant to minimize the ways these breaches jeopardized our city and we hope that it doesn’t. We mean to look at these actions more clearly.
Barry’s decision to have a romantic relationship with a member of her security detail prompts questions about her leadership, particularly her relationship to MNPD. However, the accountability process that followed these actions, in the courtroom and the court of public opinion, including whether those actions should have disqualified her to be mayor, remains relatively unexamined. We’ll be exploring this further in a few days.