Becoming

by Michelle Obama

My dad had faith in his own utility.

This is key. Never lose hope. Know your purpose!!

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

This, for me, began a habit that has sustained me for life, keeping a close and high-spirited council of girlfriends—a safe harbor of female wisdom.

Yes!

There are simply other ways of being.

Keep this in mind!! It is hard. We all live from the starting point of our own perceptions - which means there are sooooo many perspectives; maybe we should try a few different ones on for size? They may not fit, but we'll get a little more understanding, yeah?

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

No... no we do not.

This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.

OH how often do we feel this way and yet, afraid to admit it. Thanks for your vulnerability!!

For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal. I didn’t exactly want a life like my parents had. I didn’t want to live in the same house forever, work the same job, and never claim any space for myself, but I did want the year-to-year, decade-to-decade steadiness they had. “I do recognize the value of individuals having their own interests, ambitions, and dreams,” I wrote in my journal. “But I don’t believe that the pursuit of one person’s dreams should come at the expense of the couple.”

YES!!!! I love this. It's an excellent definition of how I see marriage.

There’s something innately bolstering about a person who sees his opportunities as endless, who doesn’t waste time or energy questioning whether they will ever dry up.

Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.

I understood now that what really mattered, what I’d remember forever, was the grip. It settled me like nothing else ever had. I had faith in this union, faith in this man. To declare it was the easiest thing in the world.

They weren’t striving for perfect, but managed somehow to be always excellent,

i love you Michelle Robinson Obama

I wanted to live with the hat-tossing, independent-career-woman zest of Mary Tyler Moore, and at the same time I gravitated toward the stabilizing, self-sacrificing, seemingly bland normalcy of being a wife and mother. I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other. I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all. It was an odd and confounding thing to ponder. Could I have everything? Would I have everything? I had no idea.

And happy seemed like a starting place for everything.

Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.

many of them with busy family lives and heavy-duty jobs. I understood it wasn’t always easy for them to get away. But this was part of the point. We were all so used to sacrificing for our kids, our spouses, and our work. I had learned through my years of trying to find balance in my life that it was okay to flip those priorities and care only for ourselves once in a while. I was more than happy to wave this banner on behalf of my friends, to create the reason—and the power of a tradition—for a whole bunch of women to turn to kids, spouses, and colleagues and say, Sorry, folks, I’m doing this for me.

Balance those scales!!

So many of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn’t live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us that there’s only one way to be American—that if our skin is dark or our hips are wide, if we don’t experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from another country, then we don’t belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently.

YES! YES! YES!!

There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.

Strong finish!