Previously I’ve shared a part from Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming”
about her approach towards smoking. It was a specific subject and you may find
out my comments about it here:
Besides, the book contains Michelle’s insights about her
becoming. It is a journey from an ordinary girl to a First Lady. Here are some
of the highlights I have chosen:
There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be
twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the
White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse
in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read
as something more than what it was I maintained a code for myself, though, when it came to speaking
publicly about anything or anyone in the political sphere: I said only what I absolutely believed and what I
absolutely felt.
On nights when Barack was in Washington, I lay alone in bed,
feeling as if it were me against the world. I wanted Barack for our family.
Everyone else seemed to want him for our country.
I began to see how I’d been stoking the most negative parts of
myself, caught up in the notion that everything was unfair and then
assiduously, like a Harvard-trained lawyer, collecting evidence to feed that
hypothesis. I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more
in charge of my happiness.
Having lost a fifth-grade classmate to a house fire, having
watched Suzanne die before she’d had a chance to really be an adult, I’d
learned that the world could be brutal and random, that hard work didn’t always
assure positive outcomes.
I was allowing myself to be. I was too busy resenting Barack for
managing to fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to even begin figuring
out how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy stewing over
whether or not he’d make it home for dinner that dinners, with or without him,
were no longer fun.
When they go low, we go high.
Life was better, always, when we could measure the warmth.
I could be supportive, but I couldn’t be a robot.
The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
Hillary, who was fighting a cold, also used the opportunity to go
after Barack. “ ‘Change’ is just a word,” she said, “if you don’t have the
strength and experience to make it happen.”
If you drew too much heat, you bore a certain risk.
It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal
parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s
more growing to be done.
For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a
certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to
reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end. I became a
mother, but I still have a lot to learn from and give to my children. I became
a wife, but I continue to adapt to and be humbled by what it means to truly
love and make a life with another person.
I have become, by certain.
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