The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times

by Michelle Obama

Slowly and silently and probably long before he received a formal diagnosis, MS was undermining his body, eating away at his central nervous system and weakening his legs as he went about his everyday business: working at the city’s water filtration plant, running a household with my mom, trying to raise good kids.

I was fascinated by the cane’s curved handle, the black rubber tip at its end, the hollow clatter it made when it fell to the floor.

We were starting to understand that Dad’s illness left us more vulnerable as a family, less protected.

The sound of a full-grown man hitting the floor is thunderous—a thing you never forget.

Craig and I would leverage our young bodies to help our dad back to his feet, scrambling to retrieve his cane and eyeglasses from wherever they’d flown, as if our speed in getting him upright might erase the image of his fall.

Going out, we quietly sized up the obstacles, calculating the energy it would take for my father to cross a parking lot or navigate his way through the bleachers at Craig’s basketball games.

And when one tool stopped working for him, its utility dwarfed by the strength of his disease, we’d go out and find another—the cane replaced by a pair of forearm crutches, the crutches replaced eventually by a motorized cart and a specially equipped van that was packed with levers and hydraulics to help make up for what his body could no longer do.

I spoke candidly about the pain I felt when leaving the White House—a home we’d come to love—and the legacy of my husband’s hard work as president in the hands of a reckless and uncaring successor.

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

We’ve seen intolerance and bigotry growing more acceptable rather than less, and power-hungry autocrats tightening their hold on nations around the world.

I have met young people from all over the world who are trying to find their voice and create space for their most authentic selves inside their relationships and their workplaces.

I’d been online-shopping in a scattershot way, laying in things like board games and art supplies on top of food and toilet paper, unsure of how anything would go, fully and sheepishly aware that impulse shopping is a classic American response to uncertainty.

Barack was busy writing his presidential memoirs and increasingly focused on the fact that American voters would soon be deciding whether Donald Trump should stay or

And in an effort to ease some tiny part of the burden I knew many parents were carrying, I launched a weekly video series in which I read storybooks out loud for kids.

I tracked my progress through stats—my GPA, my class rank—and was rewarded for it. Working in a corporate law firm on the forty-seventh floor of a Chicago skyscraper, I learned how to squeeze the maximum number of billable hours out of each day, week, and month.

According to my mother, every woman on her side of the family learned how to work a needle and thread, to sew, crochet, and knit. This was less about passion and more about practicality; sewing was a simple hedge against falling into poverty. If you could make or fix clothes, you’d always have a way to earn money. When little else was reliable in life, you could rely on your own two hands. My great-grandmother Annie Lawson—known to me as “Mamaw”—lost her husband at an early age but managed to support herself and two little kids in Birmingham, Alabama, in part by taking in other people’s mending.

For similar reasons, the men in my mother’s family learned skills like carpentry and shoe repair. The extended family shared resources, income, homes.

“We didn’t have an overabundance of anything,” my mother says, “but we always knew we were going to eat.”

The whole burdensome endeavor would cause her son—my grandfather Purnell Shields, whom we later called “Southside”—to shake his head and wonder out loud why it was that people who could afford a vacation home couldn’t also manage to buy their own sewing machine for that home, sparing Mamaw the hassle of carrying that weight. But, of course, there was no way to politely pose the question to the people in charge. And anyway, the answer was already clear: It wasn’t that they couldn’t. It was just that they didn’t. It’s likely they never even gave it a thought.

She tells it without moralizing, but what’s beneath it is a quiet, passed-down reminder of the weight that’s been carried over time by our family, our people—all that they needed to fix, serve, mend, and lug in order to get by.

When my father at one point declared that Craig and I should learn to mend the holes in our socks, my mother quickly shot him down, saying, “I want them focused on school, not socks, Fraser. That way, they’ll be able to buy all the socks they need someday.” I guess you could say that I grew up focused exactly that way, aimed toward a life of sock buying rather than sock mending.

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.

I can see now that this is exactly what big storms do: They breach our boundaries and burst our pipes. They tear down structures and flood our normal routes and pathways. They strip away the signposts and leave us in a changed landscape, changed ourselves, with no choice but to find a new way forward.

Barack and I had always tried to operate on the principles of hope and hard work, choosing to overlook the bad in favor of the good, believing that most of us shared common goals, and that progress could be made and measured, however incrementally, over time.

Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke of all that, it did hurt.

I kept on with the work I’d been doing—speaking at virtual voter registration drives, supporting good causes, acknowledging people’s pain—but privately I was finding it harder to access my own hope or to feel like I could make an actual difference.

I had also bought a couple of how-to books on knitting, but when I looked at them, I had a hard time translating the diagrams on the page to the motion of my hands. And so I moved myself over to YouTube, finding (as one does) a veritable ocean of tutorials and a worldwide community of passionate knitters offering hours of patient instruction and clever tips.

It was also my first experience giving a major address without a live audience, which meant there was no stage, no roar of applause, no confetti falling from the rafters, no hugs to exchange with anyone afterward. Like so much about 2020, the whole thing felt odd and a little lonely.

Find one thing you can actively complete and give yourself over to it, even if it is of no immediate benefit to anybody but yourself.

A day can feel hard and not-hard; a challenge can seem giant, and then maybe conquerable, and then two hours later, it’s overwhelming all over again. It depends not just on your circumstances but also on your mood, your attitude, your stance—all of which can change in an instant. We get pumped up and knocked down by the smallest of factors—whether the sun is shining, how our hair looks, how we slept, how we ate or didn’t eat, whether someone bothers to look kindly in our direction or not.

When you want to make a difference, when you want to change the world, your mental health will sometimes get in the way. And that’s because it’s supposed to. Health is built on balance. Balance is built on health. We need to tend carefully and sometimes vigilantly to our mental health.

When it comes to wanting to make a difference in the world, I find that it can also be useful to break down those gigantic, all-or-nothing goals into their component parts.

What becomes defeating is when great becomes the enemy of good—when we get so caught up in the hugeness of everything that we stall out before we’ve even started, when the problems appear so big that we give up on taking the smaller steps, managing what is actually in our control. Don’t forget to prioritize the things you can do, even just to sustain your energy and broaden your possibilities.

Maybe it’s being extra-disciplined about your finances so that you have more options for your future. Maybe it’s working to build sustaining relationships with others so that you have more support over time.

Small endeavors help to guard our happiness, to keep it from getting consumed by all that’s big. And when we feel good, it turns out we become less paralyzed.

When we allow ourselves to celebrate tiny victories as important and meaningful, we start to understand the incremental nature of change—how one vote can help change our democracy; how raising a child who is whole and loved can help change a nation; how educating one girl can change a whole village for the better.

This is a traditional Native American method for growing food in a resourceful way, one that’s been used for many hundreds of years and is based on the idea that each type of plant has something vital to offer the others: The corn grows tall and creates a natural pole for the bean plants to climb. The beans provide nitrogen, a nutrient that helps the other plants grow more efficiently, and the squash stays low to the ground, its large, spreading leaves helping to block weeds and keep the soil moist.

If I begin to feel out of sync, if I’m feeling unsupported or overwhelmed, I try to take stock of what my garden holds, what I’ve planted and what I still need to mix in: What’s feeding my soil? What’s helping to block the weeds? Am I cultivating both the small and the tall?

Sometimes I find that I’m helped by helping—by doing even one small thing to make somebody else’s day easier or brighter.

He’d lie in bed at night in the room we shared on Euclid Avenue, listening to some AM radio show dedicated to ghost stories as a means of falling asleep. Through the thin partition that divided the room into his space and mine, I’d hear a baritone-voiced radio host narrating tales of graveyards and zombies, dark attics and dead sea captains, punctuating his stories with jarring sound effects—creaking doors, cackles, and shrieks of horror.

Half the time, he was already asleep.

Or, rather, I absorbed these movies and Craig really did not.

My brother, meanwhile, grinned through it all, pleasantly enthralled but also bizarrely lulled. By the time the credits rolled, he was often passed out cold. Craig and I were watching the same movies, shoulder to shoulder on the same couch, but clearly having different experiences. This had everything to do with how we filtered what we were seeing.

Every few weeks or so, I’d plop myself down next to Craig on the couch and settle in for another round of Creature Features—drawn partially by my wish to be around my big brother at every opportunity, but beyond that, I think, by some thought that I, too, might learn how to look at zombies and monsters and feel more comfortably afraid.

In January 2022, for example, in response to rising rates of violent crime, Fox News was running chyrons that read Apocalyptic Hellscapes Take Over American Cities and This Is Civilization Collapsing in Real Time, essentially creating its own monster-movie version of the United States.

Not a single one of them, I would say, would call themselves fearless. Instead, what I think they share is an ability to coexist with jeopardy, to stay balanced and think clearly in its presence.

As I recall it, Robbie delivered this message with a shrug—her point being that it was up to me. The consequences were mine to bear.

Whether she understood what she was doing or was just too busy to bother, she allowed me to do the decoding, knowing of course that the turtle posed no harm.

In trying to spare yourself the worry and discomfort of taking a risk, you’re potentially costing yourself an opportunity. In clinging only to what you know, you are making your world small. You are robbing yourself of chances to grow.

I felt both a little bound and a little provoked by the legacy of my two grandfathers, proud Black men who had worked hard and taken good care of their families, but whose lives had been circumscribed by fear—often tangible and legitimate fear—and whose worlds were narrowed as a result. Southside, my mom’s dad, had difficulty trusting anyone who wasn’t family and found it nearly impossible to trust anyone who was white, which meant that he avoided a lot of people, including doctors and dentists, to the detriment of his own well-being.