Becoming

by Michelle Obama

“Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.”

I was a Cubs fan, while he liked the White Sox. I loved mac and cheese, and he couldn’t stand it. He liked dark, dramatic movies, while I went all-in for rom-coms. He was a lefty with immaculate handwriting; I had a heavy right-hand scrawl.

he’d contended most often with a deep weariness in people—especially black people—a cynicism bred from a thousand small disappointments over time.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: 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.

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

As months passed, our feelings stayed steady and reliable. For me, it became one less thing in life to question.

Life with Barack would never be dull. I knew it even then. It would be some version of banana yellow and slightly hair-raising. It occurred to me, too, that quite possibly the man would never make any money.

“He’s no ball hog,” Craig said. “But he’s got guts.”

My boyfriend, in other words, was a big deal.

In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lost by comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an unwitting challenge to my own.

“If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?”

One day I made note of a New York Times article I’d read that reported widespread fatigue, stress, and unhappiness among American lawyers—most especially female ones. “How depressing,” I wrote in my journal.

Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.

He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions.

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.

my dad used to roll his eyes at the flocks of students haplessly jaywalking across Ellis Avenue, wondering how it was that such smart people had never learned to properly cross a street.

“The person you really need to meet,” Susan said, “is Valerie Jarrett.”

I was simultaneously taken aback and completely enthralled by the clunky, controlled chaos of the place.

I was almost ready to leap, but for one thing. It wasn’t just about me anymore.

“Could I please,” I said, “also introduce you to my fiancé?”

He seemed, at times, beautifully oblivious to the giant rat race of life and all the material things a thirtysomething lawyer was supposed to be going after,

In a nutshell, Barack believed and trusted when others did not.

I had failed. I had never in my entire life failed a test,

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

It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa.

we stood there with our future still unwritten, with every unknown still utterly unknown, just gripping each other’s hands as we said our vows. Whatever was out there, we’d step into it together.

If I’d learned anything from Barack’s obsessive involvement with Project VOTE!, anyway, it was that it wasn’t helpful for me to worry about his worries—in part because I seemed to find them more overwhelming than he ever did.

we’d converted to a study at the rear of our apartment—a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole.

She was an explorer, an intrepid follower of her own heart. I saw her spirit in Barack in big and small ways.

a conversation we’d been having in one form or another for years—about impact, about how and where each one of us could make a difference, how best to apportion our time and energy.

A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level.

You don’t dangle an opportunity in front of him, something that could give him a wider field of impact, and expect him just to walk away. Because he doesn’t. He won’t.

As always, Barack was absorbing every bit of news carefully, going about his regular business while quietly developing his own thoughts about it all.

We made our schedule and stuck to it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books, cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad,

I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home.

This was what sometimes passed for achievement. I had the applesauce. I was eating a meal. Everyone was still alive.

we began hiring and training patient advocates—friendly, helpful local people, generally—who could sit with patients in the ER, helping them set up follow-up appointments at community health centers and educating them on where they could go to get decent and affordable regular care.

“Well, I’ll write another book and it’ll be a big book, one that makes money.” This made me laugh. Barack was the only person I knew who had this kind of faith, thinking that a book could solve any problem.

The experience kindled something in him, that nagging sense he wasn’t yet doing enough.

until 2016, maybe.

For better or worse, I’d fallen in love with a man with a vision who was optimistic without being naive, undaunted by conflict, and intrigued by how complicated the world was.

We understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both felt an obligation not to be complacent.

Who were we? What mattered to us? What could we do?

I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president.

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

What I felt more than anything was a sudden sense of responsibility.

This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by person.

Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.

For me, the Fourth of July 2008 was the most significant threshold we’d crossed: Ten years ago, Barack and I had shown up on the labor and delivery floor believing that we knew a lot about the world when, truly, we hadn’t yet known a thing.

the rumors and slanted commentary almost always carried less-than-subtle messaging about race, meant to stir up the deepest and ugliest kind of fear within the voting public. Don’t let the black folks take over. They’re not like you. Their vision is not yours.