Becoming

by Michelle Obama

As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

I was probably no better than her other students, no less fumbling, but I was driven. To me, there was magic in the learning. I got a buzzy sort of satisfaction from it.

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

The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it,

We’d professed love, but it was love in the context of Euclid Avenue and Red Lobster and the basketball courts at Rosenblum Park. It was love in the context of the place I’d just left.

I stuck to what I knew. It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging—the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.

This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of being.

My to-do list lived in my head and went with me everywhere. I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins. If there was a challenge to vault, I’d vault it.

I was busy climbing my ladder, which was sturdy and practical and aimed straight up.

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.

We’d known each other as goofy, half-mature college girls, and now we were adults, with adult lives and adult concerns. That idea alone sometimes struck us as hilarious.

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.

Summers in Chicago are special to me.

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

I was focused on not wasting any of the opportunities I now had, but sometimes I had to remind myself just to breathe.