Becoming

by Michelle Obama

All I could do was conjure for myself shimmery ideas about what love might be like and who might come along someday to make me feel that strong. Would it be Michael Jackson? José Cardenal from the Cubs? Someone like my dad? I couldn’t even begin to imagine him, really, the person who would become the “you” to my “I.” But now here we were.

What I felt more than anything was a sudden sense of responsibility. We owed something to each one of these people.

If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?

What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington?

The way this aged is CRAZY

“They’re not special at all. The South Side is filled with kids like that.” We just needed to help get them into those rooms.

Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again.

This was politics, yes, but in its most fractious and cynical form, seemingly disconnected from any larger sense of purpose.

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

I sometimes wonder where the bottom might be.

Kids wake up each day believing in the goodness of things, in the magic of what might be. They’re uncynical, believers at their core. We owe it to them to stay strong and keep working to create a more fair and humane world. For them, we need to remain both tough and hopeful, to acknowledge that there’s more growing to be done.