The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times

by Michelle Obama

He helped me remember that anxiety was a natural part of doing something new and big.

Some of my tools are habits and practices; some are actual physical objects; and the rest are attitudes and beliefs born out of my personal history and set of experiences, my own ongoing process of “becoming.”

Being busy is a kind of tool this way. It’s like giving yourself a suit of armor to wear: If someone’s shooting arrows in your direction, you’re less likely to register any hits. There simply isn’t time.

I’ve come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it.

Any time your circumstances start to feel all-consuming, I suggest you try going in the other direction—toward the small. Look for something that’ll help rearrange your thoughts, a pocket of contentedness where you can live for a while. And by this I don’t mean sitting passively in front of your television or scrolling through your phone. Find something that’s active, something that asks for your mind but uses your body as well. Immerse yourself in a process. And forgive yourself for temporarily ducking out of the storm.

Allow yourself the gift of absorption.

I’ve learned to recognize and appreciate balance when I feel it—to enjoy and make note of the moments when I feel the steadiest, most focused, most clear—and to think analytically about what’s helped me get to that place. I’ve found that when you’re able to read yourself this way, you are better able to recognize when you’re out of balance and to seek the help you need.

It’s about learning to deal wisely with fear, finding a way to let your nerves guide you rather than stop you.

Our hurts become our fears. Our fears become our limits. For many of us, this can be a heavy inheritance, carried by generations. It’s a lot to try to push back against, to try to unlearn.

if you try to keep your children from feeling fear, you’re essentially keeping them from feeling competence, too.

The unknown is where possibility glitters.

A simple hug is one of the most powerful tools we have for communicating gladness for another’s presence.

I am fully convinced that you will get further in life when you’ve got at least a couple of solid friends around you, when you’re reliably and demonstratively invested in them, and they in you.

Having close friendships has also helped to take pressure off my marriage, I’ve found. Barack and I have never tried to be each other’s “everything” in life—to single-handedly shoulder the entire load of care that each of us requires. I don’t expect him to want to hear every last one of my stories or thoughts, or to sort through my every worry with me, or to be solely responsible for my day-to-day entertainment and happiness.

In a true friendship, you remove your filters.

thanks to the design of social media, we are performing more often than we are connecting.

strong friendships are most often the result of strong intentions.

I’m rooting for my daughters to learn their way into maturity in their relationships, not worrying about wringing some clear result from it. I don’t want them to see marriage as some sort of trophy that must be hunted and won, or to believe that a wedding is the sort of spectacle they need to properly launch a fulfilling life, or to ever feel that having children is any sort of requirement. My hope instead is that they’ll experience different levels of commitment, figuring out how to end relationships that aren’t working and how to start new ones that seem promising. I want them to know how to navigate conflicts, to understand the heady thrills of intimacy, and to have a sense of what it’s like to get your heart shaken up. When and if my kids do choose someone, finally, to be with for life, I want them to do it from a place of strength, truly knowing who they are and what they need.

Our love is not perfect, but it’s real and we’re committed to it.

My home is my family. My home is Barack.

Real and lasting love, I think, happens mostly in the realm of in-between. Together, you are answering the question: Who are we and who do we want to be?

life’s greatest disrupter.

A relationship is dynamic this way, full of change, always evolving. At no point will both of you feel like things are perfectly fair and equal. Someone will always be adjusting. Someone will always be sacrificing. One person may be up while the other is down; one might bear more of the financial pressures while the other handles caregiving and family obligations.

life happens in seasons. Your fulfillment—in love, family, and career—rarely happens all at once.

You will be required to ignore all sorts of minor irritations and at least a few major ones, too,

And you will need to be doing it with someone who is equally able and willing to create the same latitude and show the same forbearance toward you—to love you despite all the baggage you show up with, despite what you look like and how you behave when you are at your absolute worst.

Any long-term partnership, really, is an act of stubborn faith.

I learned early on that a partner is not a fix for your issues, or a filler of your needs. People are who they are; you can’t make someone become something they don’t want to be, or into a type of person they have never had modeled for them.

True intimacy can be aggravating.

It’s always helped when we are able to name our feelings and situate some of our differences inside of personal history rather than present blame.

She tells me that it’s important to always presume the best about children—that it’s preferable to let them live up to your expectations and high regard rather than asking them to live down to your doubts and worries.

When you’re breaking new generational ground in your family—the first to leave your neighborhood, the first to go to college, the first to own a house or get any sort of toehold into stability—you travel with the pride and expectations of everyone who came before you, everyone who waved you toward the mountaintop, trusting that you’ll get there even if they couldn’t.

What we choose to share in professional settings, what we show of ourselves and when, is not only personal but also inherently complicated—an often-delicate matter of timing, circumstance, and careful judgment. We need always to be mindful of what’s at stake and who is there to receive our truth. There’s no single rule of thumb that will ever apply.

adaptability and preparedness are paradoxically linked.

If you want to break barriers and knock down walls, I’ve found, you’ll need to find and protect your own boundaries, watching over your time, your energy, your health, and your spirit as you go.

The fact that more and more Black women these days feel free to bring their full aesthetic into their professional lives, to wear their hair braided or in dreads to work, or that young people can sport body modifications or dyed hair without feeling othered, or that women have protected breastfeeding spaces at work, has more than a little to do with the work put in by people like those female partners at my law firm.