I imagine that American women across the country are on group texts with friends, as I am now, digitally linking arms with one another as they watch Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate. The moments before Ford spoke had to be among the most agonizing in public life for women in recent memory—right up there, in my mind, with the second 2016 Presidential debate, when Donald Trump hulked behind Hillary Clinton like an assailant in a dark alley, oozing menace. For so many women watching, the question now is the same as it was then: Will she keep her composure?

We know the extent to which a woman’s credibility depends on her demeanor during crucial moments of scrutiny, and there is one quality that counts above all: poise. Never have I heard a man described as poised—unless he is “poised for action,” or “poised for success.” Poise, in the common imagination, is a female quality, the demonstration of steel and grace under pressure. That women should feel pressure is taken for granted; that they should respond with steel is not. To be angry, to be sad, to be forceful, to be fearful, even to be detached: all are liabilities. Poise requires an ineffable balancing act between determination and calm. (One of its many inverses is that other female adjective, “strident.”)

Before Ford began to speak, I felt my heart pound in my throat. She was visibly nervous, maybe queasy—“terrified,” as she went on to say in her opening statement. It seemed, as Senator Charles Grassley spoke, that she might be tearing up. Would she crumple under the emotion of the moment? And, if she did, what would it mean, for all of us? This interrogation of the trauma experienced by a single person feels, as it so often does, like a referendum for all. And then Ford began to speak. Is she poised? She is, but she is something else, too—visibly human, working to rise above the tension of the moment with clarity, good will, and some welcome expertise on the biological components of memory. A friend texted me that she thinks Ford may be, at moments, too eager to please, and is frustrated by it. I understand her point, but there is something to be said for responding to vulnerability imperfectly, as we all inevitably do. Ford is nervous. So am I. But so far she has given me reason to dry my eyes and regain my own composure.