I was running late, which is unlike me, but work had thrown me into a week of community engagements and television interviews I was unprepared—and unprepped—for. At the time, I was working with October 7th survivors and hostage families. Sometimes that meant speaking beside them, a role I was honored to rise to and unsure how to play. I threw my purse across the hotel room searching for my mascara and found a yellow Post-it with smudged writing and a child-like heart drawn on it.

German Tech Guy and I met in Los Angeles. He was in town before heading to a tech conference in Las Vegas. He was sweet and mildly autistic. Drinks led to a one-night stand that led to him spending the entire week with me. Smiling down at the yellow Post-it in my hand, I was reminded of a version of myself I hadn’t seen in a while. I texted him as I rushed myself to the hotel lobby.

There was a lot I couldn’t say on television. The constraints weren’t malevolent and were mostly self-imposed. The Professional Me was concise, measured, and empathetic in exactly the right quantities. The dating version was lighter, less political (if you can believe it), and vaguely mysterious. Neither version was entirely fake, and neither version was entirely me.

The hostage crisis needed to remain friendly across the political spectrum, though there are people I won’t be naming who tried to use it for their own political purposes. When a journalist occasionally asked me about Netanyahu or human rights violations, I knew my goal—especially as an unaffected party—was to make sure the mostly non-Jewish viewers remembered at least one of the 251 men, women, and children taken on October........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)