Becoming

by Michelle Obama

I know that I am who I am not because of the titles I’ve held or the celebrities I’ve met, but because of the snaking paths and winding roads, the frustrations and contradictions, the constant growth that is painful and joyful and full of confusion.

What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

Or maybe it’s my new life just beginning to announce itself.

The point was that the dolls and blocks needed me to give them life, and I dutifully gave it to them, imposing one personal crisis after another. Like any good deity, I was there to see them suffer and grow.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn.

The lesson being that in life you control what you can.

I was the only person in the family to talk back to Dandy when he yelled.

These were highly intelligent, able-bodied men who were denied access to stable high-paying jobs, which in turn kept them from being able to buy homes, send their kids to college, or save for retirement.

(one time accidentally turning it green),

Hhahhaha

My mom was simply even-keeled. She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring. When things were bad, she gave us only a small amount of pity. When we’d done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did.

“I’m raising adults.” She and my dad offered guidelines rather than rules. It meant that as teenagers we’d never have a curfew. Instead, they’d ask, “What’s a reasonable time for you to be home?” and then trust us to stick to our word.

It was our life, not hers, and always would be.

Her mom is the best

There’s no hurrying a bus ride, I can tell you. You get on and you endure.

But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.

And in the end, I hadn’t needed to show her anything. I was only showing myself.

They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.

It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to the people gathered in the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

apparently unaware that they, too, could die at any moment. It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with it. For me, coexisting with Barack’s strong sense of purpose—sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it—was something to which I had to adjust, not because he flaunted

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.

THERE ARE TRUTHS we face and truths we ignore.

“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.”

IT HURTS TO LIVE AFTER someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories.

Grief is so lonely this way.

There was power in voting. If you wanted change, you couldn’t stay home on Election Day.

Government issues, I was learning, were elaborate and unending.

You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

This was my privilege, the gift of being female.

“We hear a lot of talk from politicians about the importance of family values,” he wrote. “Hopefully, you will understand when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best he can.”

Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was useful to see. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was cherished and growing just fine.

But no matter how it panned out, I knew I’d at least done something good for myself in speaking up about my needs.

But I now knew enough to understand that politics was never especially kind to families.

This for me felt like a true and odd measure of his fame: Even white people were recognizing him now.

obliquely,

I like this word

Barack was a Black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.

Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.

In other words, I cared what people thought. I’d spent my young life seeking approval, dutifully collecting gold stars and avoiding messy social situations. Over time, I’d gotten better about not measuring my self-worth strictly in terms of standard, by-the-book achievement, but I did tend to believe that if I worked diligently and honestly, I’d avoid the bullies and always be seen as myself. This belief, though, was about to come undone.

I was being painted not simply as an outsider but as fully “other,” so foreign that even my language couldn’t be recognized.

When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder?

Optics would always rule our lives.

I felt sometimes like a swan on a lake, knowing that my job was in part to glide and appear serene, while underwater I never stopped pedaling my legs.

Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.

At one point, one of the social workers interjected, saying to the group, “Eighty degrees and sunny!” Everyone in the circle began nodding, ruefully. I wasn’t sure why. “Tell Mrs. Obama,” she said. “What goes through your mind when you wake up in the morning and hear the weather forecast is eighty and sunny?” She clearly knew the answer, but wanted me to hear it. A day like that, the Harper students all agreed, was no good. When the weather was nice, the gangs got more active and the shooting got worse.

So sad. The space we inhabit is different for all. These poor kids have been failed.

Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids.

These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.

sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.

I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self.

Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.