Becoming

by Michelle Obama

an “angry black woman.” I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it “angry” or “black” or “woman”?

Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed.

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. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness.

The color of our skin made us vulnerable. It was a thing we’d always have to navigate.

Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

Like a lot of girls, I became aware of the liabilities of my body early, long before I began to even look like a woman.

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.

The first thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. 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.

This meant finding a new profession, and what shook me most was that I had no concrete ideas about what I wanted to do. Somehow, in all my years of schooling, I hadn’t managed to think through my own passions and how they might match up with work I found meaningful. As a young person, I’d explored exactly nothing.

I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law.

mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I be a teacher? A college administrator? Could I run some sort of after-school program, a professionalized version of what I’d done for Czerny at Princeton? I was interested in possibly working for a foundation or a nonprofit. I was interested in helping underprivileged kids. I wondered if I could find a job that engaged my mind and still left me enough time to do volunteer work, or appreciate art, or have children. I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to feel whole. I made a list of issues that interested me: education, teen pregnancy, black self-esteem. A more virtuous job, I knew, would inevitably involve a pay cut.

There are truths we face and truths we ignore.

I just had the advantage of an advocate.

I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mind-set, translated only to “angry.”

it’s harder to hate up close.

If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.

being viewed as representatives of our race.

I never expected to be someone who hired others to maintain my image, and at first the idea was discomfiting. But I quickly found out a truth that no one talks about: Today, virtually every woman in public life—politicians, celebrities, you name it—has some version of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl. It’s all but a requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double standard.

More than anything, I hoped this was what they’d carry forward into the future—the ease, the sense of community, the encouragement to speak and be heard.

that in learning to feel comfortable at the White House, they’d go on to feel comfortable and confident in any room, sitting at any table, raising their voices inside any group.

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.

The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you.

kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in.

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

Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us.