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Babes in Bookland
A podcast celebrating women's memoirs, one story at a time!
Babes in Bookland
Choosing Hope // Michelle Obama's "Becoming"
What does it take to keep becoming?
We dive into Michelle Obama’s memoir with a candid, hopeful conversation about where identity starts, how it stretches, and why purpose, not pageantry, changes lives. Becoming is more than a political memoir; it’s a field guide for growth when the ground shifts under your feet.
From a tight-knit South Side home to Princeton lecture halls and the relentless spotlight of the White House, we follow the real work behind “Becoming”: respecting kids as full people, naming systemic barriers without losing heart, and finding tools for reflection that actually fit your life.
We talk about confidence as a practice, not a trait, and the power of saying yes to yourself when the room says no. You’ll hear how Michelle reframed the First Lady role around substance and how those choices challenged corporate norms while building common ground. We also get real about the invisible labor of women, the racialized scrutiny that followed her every outfit and sentence, and the line that still echoes: grief and resilience live together.
If news fatigue has dimmed your hope, this episode offers practical ways to protect it: curate your inputs, seek help when you need it, and anchor to community. We share simple habits: quiet walks, gratitude notes, honest check-ins that keep optimism alive without ignoring pain. It’s a warm, grounded tour through the memoir’s biggest lessons on leadership, partnership, and civic action, designed for anyone asking how to stay human and useful when progress stalls.
Come for the stories; leave with a sturdier stance. If this conversation resonates, tap follow, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.
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Link to this episode’s book:
Michelle Obama’s “Becoming”
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This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy
Special thanks to my dear friend, Jaime!
Xx, Alex
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Hi, welcome to Babes in Bookland, your women's memoir podcast. I'm your host, Alex Franca, and my friend Jamie is back to discuss Michelle Obama's becoming. As always, if you want to hear the extended version of this discussion, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or find us on Patreon. And you can further support the show by purchasing some of our cute merch from TeePublic. Babes of Bookland. I love it. Happy holidays. We're here. We're at the end of the year. We're getting through. What a year it's been. What a year it's been becoming one of the most popular women's memoirs of all time. I totally missed it when it first came out, but you you read it pretty quickly when it came out, right? Back in 2018.
SPEAKER_01:I did.
SPEAKER_00:What did you think? I loved it.
SPEAKER_01:And like after that, I was like, Barack, you're lucky to be with Michelle. She's a baddie.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it really kind of solidifies that behind every great man is an even greater woman, potentially. I think learning about what she did in order for him to do what he did was really enlightening for me. You kind of assume most of the time, but she really laid it all out the good, the bad, the ugly, and I appreciated it.
SPEAKER_01:And we know like now she could have pursued presidency herself, right? She had her reasons for not, but like she is sharp and and very qualified within her own right. But yeah, she she wears mini hats, and it was great to like kind of see behind what we see publicly in her own words.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It was actually a surprisingly emotional experience for me to read it this year now, because so much has changed in the political spectrum. Even when it just comes to like the word integrity, feeling inspired, yes, by her and her journey. Feeling hopeful, sure. But if I'm if I'm being honest, it bummed me out too. It bummed me out that it feels like we've taken uh a lot of steps back when it comes to the office of the presidency and what that stands for, the unification of America as opposed to the division of America. So I had I had a very emotional experience reading this book, but I am glad to wrap up the year with it. We've but yeah, this because I heard that it was such an inspiring and hopeful memoir, I just think it hits a little differently if you read it right now. That's fair.
SPEAKER_01:And I think it's a good reminder that progress is rarely linear, you know? Sometimes you do take one step forward, two steps back. I I like to think about it as a um line graph, right? It's gonna not be a constant line up, but hopefully it trends up over time. So whether you're thinking about that in terms of political progress, societal progress, just personal progress, like I think it's an important reminder to not lose hope even when you're in those those valley times.
SPEAKER_00:Well said, Jamie. This is why you are an often guest on this podcast. Okay, let's get into it. So, like I said earlier, Michelle Obama's memoir was published in 2018. And this is her dedication. It's kind of a long one, so stick with me. To all of the people who have helped me become the folks who raised me, Frasier, Mary, and Craig, and my vast extended family, my circle of strong women who always lift me up, my loyal and dedicated staff who continue to make me proud, to the loves of my life, Malia and Sasha, my two most precious peas who are my reasons for being, and finally Barack, who always promised me an interesting journey. That's a really that's beautiful, an interesting journey. That's all we can promise, right? And I had that to put it lightly. To put it lightly. Okay, so let's start with our quick topics. Michelle writes about keeping a journal. This is in her mid-20s. She writes, I was not a daily writer or even a weekly writer. I picked up a pen only when I had the time and energy to sort through my feelings. I'd write a few entries in a single week and then lay the journal down for a month or sometimes more. I was not by nature especially introspective. The whole exercise of recording one's thoughts was new to me, a habit I'd picked up in part, I suppose, from Barack, who viewed writing as therapeutic and clarifying. All right, James, how have you found is the best way for you to be introspective, work through your thoughts?
SPEAKER_01:I will say when it comes to journaling specifically, like it's good to just remember that that's a tool in all of our toolboxes that we can use at any point. But my relationship with it has been similar to Michelle, where it just never really stuck long term. But that doesn't mean it doesn't still have value. Like you can reflect and say, oh, is that what I want to do right now? And and it doesn't even have to be pen to paper. Um, I will say I put notes in my phone occasionally, uh, specifically if it's something I want to talk to my therapist about. Uh just a little note. But otherwise, I think the the more frequent introspection for me comes from I walk my dog at least twice a day and I don't listen to music. I don't I don't listen to podcasts. Sorry, Alex. How dare I just listen to nothing? And that is kind of where my thoughts really come to the forefront.
SPEAKER_00:One could say you're listening to yourself. Oh, you could.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, but I won't. No. Um yeah. So so I think just having that quiet time and with a walking part of it too, because I have tried like seated silent meditation. And again, there's value in that. But yeah, find what works for you. And for me, walking my dog in the quiet is when I'm able to get the most clarity the most often.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. I I do like to listen to my podcasts while I walk, just because I have podcasts that I really enjoy listening to. And there's just not time during the day unless I'm driving my car and I don't drive it very far. Um, so that's kind of my time to catch up on those. But I have started to go AirPod lists, podcast list for some of my walks. And you're right, there is something about just even taking in the sounds of nature and really being present with what's around you as opposed to kind of like in your head listening to whatever you're listening to, I think is really important as well. One of the biggest things that I've learned through my life is to let go of doing something the quote unquote right way. You know, people talk about journaling. Make sure you get in your morning pages. I'm not waking up 45 minutes early to write in a journal. That doesn't serve me. Maybe it serves people. Maybe it would serve me if I tried to make it a habit. But where I am in my life right now, I love just this low-stakes idea that Michelle introduces here that you're also echoing. Find what works for you. There have definitely been times in my life where I've needed to get my thoughts out. I have so many beautiful journals that people have gifted me over the years. I pick one, I write it down. Sometimes I look back and I'm like, oh my gosh, I wrote in this two years ago. That's kind of crazy to revisit. And I think just giving yourself permission to do what works for you every day. And every day is different. And every day you're gonna feel different. You're gonna need to sift through your thoughts and your thing and the things in your life differently, and that's okay.
SPEAKER_01:Totally agree.
SPEAKER_00:Let's dive deeper. So Michelle divides her memoir into three parts, and I'm gonna follow suit because I think it's pretty genius. There's becoming me, which is her upbringing, childhood, early identity, becoming us, her relationship with Barack Obama, learning to be a part of a partnership, and becoming more, her life in the White House, her public role, and life after. So we're gonna start with becoming me. So we begin on the south side of Chicago, where Michelle Robinson grew up in a tight-knit family. She writes, The Kennedys were dead, Martin Luther King Jr. has been killed, setting setting off riots in the country, including Chicago. The 1968 Democratic Convention turned bloody as police went after Vietnam War protesters with batons and tear gas about nine miles north of where we lived. None of this really registered with me. I was just a kid, a girl with Barbies and blocks, with two parents and an older brother who slept each night with his head about three feet from mine. My family was my world, the center of everything. You know, this really resonated with me now. As a parent, I have realized that part of my job is protecting my children from the greater tragedies that are happening in the world. It's not about keeping them in this perfect little Mayberry bubble and pretending that adversity and bad things don't exist. It's about having conversations with them about those things when it's time. But like my job is really to make sure that my children have a joyful childhood so that they can be set up the best way to be adults who I think can function healthily in society, right? And that's been one thing that I've been struggling with as the news for me has gotten harsher and the world feels scarier. It was nice to be reminded that like we've been here before. 1968 Democratic Convention turned bloody. We've been in tumultuous times before. And also, I need to do what I need to do in order to not bring that into my my children's world right now because they are young and they should be playing with Barbies and blocks and they should feel hopeful and not scared and all that stuff. Totally.
SPEAKER_01:Creating both physical spaces of safety and psychological safety for your kids as best you can is like the best thing you can do as a parent for them, right? To your point, like bad things will happen in the world and continue to, but how do you set them up to be resilient as those things happen and as they become more in the know the older they get? You have those safe spaces that they can literally or figuratively go to. Um, and we still need that, you know, as adults for ourselves.
SPEAKER_00:I agree. Let's get back to Michelle because we'll also talk about where she realized for the first time that bad things do happen. Um, and we'll get there. But before that, let's talk about her father, Fraser. He had MS, but he never complained. She writes, he was the sort of person who accepted what came and just kept moving forward. His credo, most people were good people if you treated them well. She continues, In my family, we have a long-standing habit of blocking out bad news, of trying to forget it almost the moment it arrives. My so my grandfather passed away when I was eight. But that was when I realized in a very still like conceptual way that people die, that bad things happen. And then kind of after that, my parents got divorced. So again, I feel like I learned early on that life isn't just good positive things, but you can still have a good positive life despite adversity and bad things happening to you. It can be overwhelming if you go through life too long before you start having adversity, right? Because then all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I never learned how to deal with this. Right.
SPEAKER_01:It sounds like you learned early on like bad things happen and life goes on.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Back to Michelle, her mother Marion ran the household with quiet strength. She writes, When I got angry as a kid, I almost always funneled it through my mother. She never indulged my outrage, but took my frustration seriously. And her mother took Michelle's complaints about being in a disruptive classroom seriously and set about making it right and getting Michelle and some of her classmates' place in a different class with a more conductive atmosphere to learning. You see Michelle reflected in her mother. She's like, okay, there's a problem. How do we solve it? We can take some of the emotions out. What's the pragmatic way that we can go about doing this? Michelle writes this 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. I really like that. I wanted to include that because I think that's a really important statement. I personally believe that children deserve our respect just as much as we ask them to respect us. I think it's a two-way street. And I think that kids learn respect early on, and they feel it if you don't respect them or what they have to say. And they feel devalued. They feel like their voice and opinion doesn't matter. And then so how are you supposed to go from feeling that way as a child to all of a sudden your voice and your opinion matter as an adult? It's hard to navigate that. And on the flip side, I think then sometimes people like scream way too much into the void because they were so devalued as a child that they're like, I will take all the value I can now in social media or however.
SPEAKER_01:I would imagine it's probably like a trickle down of how you were treated when you were a kid, right? People tend to mimic that. But good reminder that while kids are not tiny adults, they are like biologically in a different place in their development. They are equally human, right? So treating them as such.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And if maybe you didn't like being devalued or feeling disrespected as a child, why would you turn that around and and perpetuate that same feeling? Why wouldn't you stop and say, gosh, I didn't like this? How can I be different moving forward? Do you feel like your parents valued your opinion and respected what you had to say at a young age?
SPEAKER_01:I do. I actually do. I was a pretty quiet kid, less so at home. And I think maybe there are ways that things could have been drawn out of me more. But whenever I did speak up, I don't recall like feeling shut down often. It was usually met with curiosity or as much understanding as they could give from their perspective perspectives. They had different perspectives sometimes.
SPEAKER_00:Back to Michelle, she describes her mother as very even keeled and that she loved her and her brother constantly, but they weren't overmanaged. She writes, her mother said, I'm not raising babies, she'd tell us. I'm raising adults, which I loved. You know, there's been a big the helicopter parents, the kind of overintrusive thing. And being a parent, I understand it. It is so, it is so hard to send your child out into the world. You want to protect them. You do, you want to keep, you want to keep them from pain as long as you can. But does that serve them in the long term? I just really loved how simple this was. I'm not raising babies, I'm raising adults. It's like, oh yeah, right. That's true. You know? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Raising future adults or something like that. Yeah, that makes me think of while I'm not a parent, I'm very curious about child development philosophies and have been an educator. And the model that I've learned of that you probably know about is like the lighthouse parenting style. So rather than a helicopter, helicopter hovering above lighthouse, like think about what purpose a lighthouse serves. Like you stay in one place. They always know where you are and that you're there. And like you're watching out for them, but you're not hovering over them and they're free to wander from you. You're not like following them where they go per se. But yeah, yeah, you're just kind of like that steadiness that is never too far, but also not like too close unless they want you to be, then they can come close.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. Be a lighthouse, not a helicopter. It's a lot quieter too. Triller life for you, too. Well, it depends, right? Because if you're an anxious person, then being the helicopter parent makes you feel better about yourself and your situation. If you're a little worried, standing back and letting them go can feel really hard. But again, it's about serving your children and not serving you, I think, at the end of the day. And that can be a really hard thing to discern, the difference. So Michelle and her brother were taught empathy from an early age. She writes, even if we didn't know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance. Do you feel like your parents taught you empathy from a young age?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know like if I was explicitly taught the word, but the essence of it for sure. Primarily by modeling, right? Like modeling, treating other people with kindness, empathy for, I would say, one another. And also we grew up with pets always. And that's like a very tangible way to see care being modeled, assuming the pets are well cared for.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know my mom. She's like the most empathetic, compassionate, maybe to her detriment person that I've come across. My mom would talk about you can never know another person's story until you walk a mile in their shoes. Like that was a phrase that popped up often in my childhood. And, you know, going to church, honestly, look, there are some bad parts of religion. We all know that. But especially in the Catholic Church, we were always giving money for people in other countries. We were being taught that not everybody was living in a cushy little suburban home where food was readily available. And also, I think the circumstances that my parents grew up in, that working class, making money stretch, my mom was one of five. And, you know, my grandmother had times in her life when she wasn't able to be as present with my mom's family. So I just think like my through my mom's adversity growing up, like she wanted me to know that I was living a very different life, that not everybody was living the life that I was living. And so I do really appreciate that. I think I learned empathy and compassion from a really, really young age. And I think that that was because of my mom and also growing up in the church. Luckily, my church did focus more on that as opposed to like just know Jesus and he'll save you or whatever. It was like, it's part of our job to take care of other people. Yeah, service, service mindset. Yeah. So back to Michelle. She was bright, curious, and determined. She loved to learn. Quote, there was a magic in it. And she knew early on that she wanted more. She worked hard to stay among the other intelligent and ambitious children in her school. And I saw myself in Michelle. I loved learning. I loved being curious. I loved getting A's. I loved doing well. Like I was really into all of that. I was, I was a Rory. I was not as smart as Rory. I could have never gotten into Yale or Harvard or any of those that she got into. But um, I loved learning from a young age. And I don't know how that was fostered. I think through reading, how do you think because you were also very smart, James, and you applied yourself, you were ambitious, you want, you wanted to get good grades and you did. How do you think your parents fostered curiosity or a love for learning in you?
SPEAKER_01:I think it kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier with parents or any adult who treats kids with respect and and care, right? And treating them as autonomous humans, like knowing that my parents were interested in what I had to say about things that made me more inclined to ask questions and learn more. But I will also say that like perfectionist tendency of like, oh, I'm supposed to make A's, right? I'm supposed to not get in trouble and learning maybe in school less from a joy place and more from a sense of obligation place. But we know that learning happens outside of classrooms too, maybe even more so than in classrooms. So yeah, I have joy exploring things like with my mom. She was always like playing very hands-on, talking, having philosophical conversations with my dad when I was like in high school, right? Really yeah uh got my wheels turning.
SPEAKER_00:It's true. It's that's something that I've unpacked in other episodes too, this idea of perfectionism. And my parents held me to a very high standard. They rewarded the outcome while emphasizing the journey for sure. But also like, I was just competitive growing up. Like I wanted to be the best in every way that I could prove that. So but yeah, it's always about finding that balance. Because you definitely want, I want my children to be ambitious. I want them to do their best, whatever that capability is. I don't want them to be lazy, but I also don't want them to be anxious and feel overwhelmed. The older I get, the more I'm like, whatever that sweet spot balances. And and like to your point earlier, meeting my child where they are, not comparing my son to my daughter. If my daughter does this easily, that doesn't necessarily mean that he will. Figuring out what the different standards are for each child and each subject. Just because somebody excels at reading doesn't mean that they excel at math. Maybe it does. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:Or because they excelled this year doesn't mean they will in the next year, right? So, like that comparison to self over time is a thing too.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, sure is. All right, back to Michelle. We're gonna talk about her first tragedy. She writes about a horrifying event when a family from her school dies in a house fire. Michelle writes about dealing with more adversity and some difficult topics. She writes, as we grew, we spoke more about drugs and sex and life choices, about race and inequality and politics. Her family never sugarcoated what they took to be the harder truths about life. She recalls a time when her brother was accused of stealing his own bike by a police officer, quote, unwilling to accept that a young black boy would have come across a new bike in an honest way. She writes, the color of our skin made us vulnerable. It was a thing we'd always have to navigate. And she has many examples of systemic racism in her book, especially the ways that it played out in her own family history, the grandfather who struggled to find work, even after training as an electrician, because he was denied the union card he needed to work on the big job sites. She writes, This particular form of discrimination altered the destinies of generations of African Americans, including many men in my family, limiting their income, their opportunity, and eventually their aspirations. She continues, these were highly intelligent, able-bodied men who were denied access to the table of high-paying jobs, which in turn kept them from being able to buy homes and send their kids to college or save for retirement. And there's a ripple effect that still plays out today. She writes about the quotas that had initially been put in place to restrict the number of black families that could move to a planned community originally built in 1948. And while her family was visiting this other black family there, her father's car is keyed. Her father had it fixed and moved on. So Michelle is reckoning with this world that feels a certain way about her and her family because of their skin color. But she's also, she also faces her smaller community that feels her way of speaking, quote, like a white girl is a form of betrayal. She writes that they feel it's being uppity, as somehow denying our culture. Are you who you appear to be? Do I trust you or not? And she foreshadows that, quote, I'd see this confusion play out on the national stage among whites and blacks alike. The need to situate someone inside his or her ethnicity and the frustration that comes with it can't easily be done. I always just appreciate when you read a memoir written by a black woman, obviously it's a very different perspective and way of growing up, way of existing in the world than I could even begin to imagine. So I always just appreciate, and I like to just also share excerpts from her memoir. She obviously her skin color and Barack Obama's skin color and the ripple effect of us having a black president, I think we are still seeing play out in a very large way right now. And I think it's just really important to be aware of it and ask ourselves why and how we can move past this world where skin color does play such a huge role in people's individual success, cultural success, societal success. I don't have the answers to that. I think the first part is just acknowledging that this exists, that systemic racism exists, not ignoring it, not pretending that we don't have a dark history as a country. And you have biases that you maybe you don't even realize that you have. And we need to recognize these within ourselves. Totally. I feel like you're about to say all of that way better than I just did.
SPEAKER_01:No, that was the world. Well said. And my only additional comment is just I think when Barack Obama became president, some people used that to as a thing to point to and say, see, we're post-racial now. Like we don't have racism in our country anymore, right? And we can see from the after effects, you know, with Trump's America and the MAGA movement, like that is very much not the case. Racism had been in many ways pushed down, right? Where it was like less blatant and it's come out of the woodwork in some really big ways. So, so we are not past it. And, you know, the where does it come from and why? I think because none of us are 200 years old, we forget that slavery was legal in our country less than 200 years ago. Um, and societal change takes a lot of time. And in the scope of history, like that was not super long ago. So, of course, the butterfly effect of all that, like we're still seeing, and it will take more time and repairing to get to a point where we truly have, you know, racial equality in our country.
SPEAKER_00:And introspection. I think if you have had certain judgments taught to you, it takes a certain type of person to say, wait a second, why am I being told these things? Why are these words being spoken in my house? What does that mean for this person who taught me this? And what does that mean for the person that we're speaking against this way? You know, we're not so far removed from removed from the civil rights movement. Yes. And I think it takes educating yourself and also accountability. I think that that is a huge thing that our country is lacking right now. Everyone wants to place the blame on someone else instead of saying, How am I a part of perpetuating this problem? How have I either been conditioned to believe that a person is less than me because of their skin color? How am I continuing to tune into a news channel that's telling me that people with certain skin color coming and trying to steal my jobs? What does that actually look like in my industry? Is that even true? And I just think that there's a lot, there's a lot of fear. And then there's a lot of, like I said, lack of accountability where people don't want to actually do the work that it takes. I don't know what the answers are. This is why I'm not a politician and I'm not trying to like run on any sort of platform that makes you believe that I know how to fix this. But I do, I think that there's just a lot of blaming and not a lot of accountability. And I would welcome, I would welcome a politician who would say, you know what, I'm gonna take accountability and I'm gonna say, here's how I am to blame and how I'm gonna personally fix this problem for myself, as opposed to just being like, well, the other side is wrong. Yeah, that would be refreshing. Okay, so Michelle's intelligence continues to take her places. She goes to a magnet high school and then later to Princeton, but she writes about this niggling feeling, am I enough? She even tells us that a guidance counselor says, quote, I'm not sure that you're Princeton material. Michelle writes, but as I've said, failure is a feeling long before it's an actual result. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every last thing my parents had ever told me. Had I decided to believe her, her pronouncement would have toppled my confidence all over again. But three years of keeping up with ambitious kids had taught me that I was something more. I wasn't going to let one person's opinion dislodge everything I thought about myself. She works hard and she gets in. And she doesn't pull a na na na na na na, which I totally would have, and show her admission letter to her counselor. But this was a famous quote from this memoir, right? Fear is a feeling long before it's an actual result. Put so beautifully, it's put so simply, it's a great reminder. And I love that she included this example. Like this, she was not gonna let this one person's opinion, yes, this seemingly important person, right? Your college career guidance counselor, she wasn't gonna let that be her that person's opinion define Michelle to herself because she knew she was better than that.
SPEAKER_01:Hearing you recount that, I was just like, that bitch, how dare she?
SPEAKER_00:Honestly, like, what the fuck does that help anyone?
SPEAKER_01:No, because she had nothing to lose from going for it, you know, only something to potentially gain.
SPEAKER_00:Unless she was one of those weird, like reverse psychology things. Like, did she think, oh, if I tell Michelle she's not good enough, that means she'll work extra hard. I don't think that's her place to do that. Number one, I think she should only be encouraging. Michelle came to you, she said, I wanted to get into Princeton. You should just be like the legally blonde lady and say, Okay, well, here's what you need.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I do not think it was that. It sounds like it was definitely unconscious or maybe conscious bias at play. And I do hope that she found out at some point that Michelle got in and hopefully took that as a lesson.
SPEAKER_00:When she sees Michelle one day as first lady, she's like, Oh shit, was I wrong about her?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, a lesson to not do that to other people. I mean, I think it came from Michelle's family and the way she was raised and shaped that she had the confidence to proceed despite that person dissuading her or trying to dissuade her from doing so. Some kids that would have broke them. That would have been like, okay, then I'm not doing it.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes, because it also goes to show no matter how many encouraging voices you have in your head, sometimes all it takes is that one discouraging one for you to latch on to and believe. So at Princeton, Michelle was constantly aware of her differences. One of the few Black students, one of the few from a working class background, men outnumbered women, two to one. But she does find a community with the other Black students. She writes So many of us arrived at college not even aware of what our disadvantages were. It was like stepping out on stage at your first piano recital and realizing you'd never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but your Asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else. This is doable, of course. Minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time, but it takes energy, it requires effort, an extra level of confidence to own your presence in the room. I really appreciated that metaphor. Anne Michelle does the work. She graduates from Princeton. She then gets her law degree from Harvard, and she starts a job in Chicago at a high-end law firm. I know where this is going. This is where she meets Mr. Barack Obama. But to just kind of wrap up this section, becoming me, there's this big theme of belonging here. She was feeling like she wasn't enough. She was figuring out how to belong to two worlds, allowing or refusing to shape her identity to how others viewed her. And she encourages us all to realize whose opinion matters and whose doesn't. So, James, looking back on your childhood, how you were raised, how would you reflect on how you became you?
SPEAKER_01:That's a big question. Yeah, I think I'm I'm still becoming me, right? Like maybe that's the point of your whole life, right? Just to keep honing in like who you are and evolving. But um, like Michelle, I think family, friends, nature, nurture, a combination of all those things shapes your identities.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would say if becoming me was kind of like her childhood. So if we can kind of like equate that to our our childhoods, there's a way that you move through your life with how you've been raised by your family, your experiences at school. And then there's kind of a point where I think you start revisiting those things and seeing what still serves you and seeing what doesn't serve you. Like I think when you become aware, okay, I was an anxious child and not having these conversations with my parents maybe hindered me a little bit more than helped me. I think that's a part of like the becoming more. But I agree, like overall, we're always becoming. I hope we never stop evolving and learning and being curious. That's what I appreciated about her memoir was okay, here was the way that I was shaped as a child. And then here's the way that I'm shaped in my partnership. But here's how I'm continuing to reshape myself in the becoming more sections. Hopefully, we've all evolved from the way that we've thought and viewed the world when we were children and teenagers, and even like in our young 20s. Our frontal lobe has developed and we've just had more life experiences. Think if you're not changing, I would just encourage you to try to figure out why. Let's move on.
SPEAKER_01:Wait, we're not going to talk about her smoking weed. That was like my favorite part of this memoir. Talk about it. I will say that a highlight for me of the becoming me section was learning that Michelle Robinson partook in cannabis. I was like, she's just like us.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Okay, becoming us. So she goes into really sweet detail about how she first met Barack. He was this like hot shot guy who came to work at her law firm. He was like late the first day, but everybody was like already talking about him. It was really, really interesting. She's actually his mentor at the law firm. And she's skeptical about him at first, but ultimately she falls in love. And she reminds us that falling in love does not mean losing yourself. She writes, Barack had arrived in my life as a fully formed person. From our very first conversation, he'd shown me that he wasn't self-conscious about expressing fear or weakness and that he valued being truthful. At work, I'd witnessed his humility and willingness to sacrifice his own needs and wants for a bigger purpose. I appreciate a man who gets real and vulnerable and doesn't pretend like he has it all figured out and who can be honest about his fears and his weaknesses and has humility. Okay, James, how did you decide to go from a me to an us?
SPEAKER_01:Shortly before meeting my now husband, I had gotten out of a bad relationship and had been single for a little bit and kind of reached the conclusion of even though I knew I wanted a life companion, that that didn't need to happen at any particular time, right? Like societal norms of like getting married in your whatever 20s or 30s, you know, I can't control when I meet the right person or a right person. So I had kind of come to accept like if I don't meet my person till I'm 50, like that's fine. You weren't gonna settle. Wasn't gonna settle and had become content with the life I'd built for myself. But again, still hoping and and ultimately wanting a life partner was dating. And, you know, when I met Jonathan, realizing that, okay, I found this person who I'm as into as they are into me, and we have compatible, you know, long-term goals, like we both want this to go to the same place. That's when I was like, okay, there could be an us here too. And it's like not losing me, right? But adding us. How do you and your husband work to stay on the same page? I think we're still learning. We're still we've been together about seven years, married for five-ish. And yeah, living together for most of the time that we've been together. But really, the the thing that has been that we've been most successful with, I think, is just communicating, right? Like as cliche as that sounds. Like I don't expect him to know what I'm thinking or feeling unless I tell him and vice versa. So not being afraid to have uncomfortable conversations. I think that's that's been the key to our success thus far.
SPEAKER_00:When you learn how to communicate effectively, that's when you can really have those sustainable, healthy relationships.
SPEAKER_01:But it does take that person communicating with you as well. And not just romantic relationships, right? Like that's true of long-term friendships like ours and strong familial relationships, right? Otherwise, relationships will not have sustained depth or they'll fizzle out, or sometimes end with a bang if if people aren't willing to be real with each other.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Is there a part of you that you feel your husband has helped amplify or has he taught you anything about yourself?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think the thing that comes to mind is like, I feel like he's helped me to be a more confident person twofold. One, because he's a very confident person, but he also just yeah, uplifts me. And when I'm not that I don't still have like periods or moments of self-doubt, but he's always reminding me of like what I bring to the table in those moments. And I think that differs from prior relationships I'd been in, where I either had, I'm thinking of one ex who was kind of actively hurting my self-confidence. Yeah. And then I think of another one who really like did uplift me, but also didn't have a lot of confidence on their own. So it didn't have the same weight. So yeah, and that confidence is translated to me like trying things I maybe wouldn't have before. Like one very clear example that kind of kind of seems silly, but makes me feel really empowered and liberated is riding my my bike on the road with cars. Like that's kind of a scary thing, or was for me before. And now I'm just like all about it. And and he's inspired that in me.
SPEAKER_00:Yay. As one of your besties, I I applaud. The big thing about Barack for Michelle is his unwavering, extremely optimistic we all guessed it, hope. She writes, I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine. It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck. This hope is what carries him and them, their entire family, to support his running for and ultimately becoming president. But that was not the path that she wanted to take. She understood the scrutiny, the danger, the hate that would come their way. But his belief that he could change things for the better was contagious. James, what's your relationship with hope these days? How do you stay hopeful?
SPEAKER_01:Great question, Alex. Personally, it's been a harder year to put hope into practice for a number of reasons, like health challenges in the family, like the way I've felt in light of our country's political climate, work stuff, mental health stuff, all these things combined. And I will say that when I when I felt my hope dwindling, my hope for the future for myself and for our country dwindling, I sought help from professionals. You know, I've tried I've tried a number of different things, therapy, medications, etc. And they haven't all worked. But always being willing to like, okay, try the next thing, try the next thing, not giving up. And even when the hope, like wanting to be hopeful, hoping for hope sort of thing. So yeah, happy to report. I'm feeling like I'm like coming on on the upswing for the first time in a while. But yeah, I think that's that would be my two cents for anyone who is struggling with hope is just like if you feel like you've lost it, try and tag on to someone who has it or like a professional who believes that they can help you restore it and you know has the the credentials and the reviews to back that with other people.
SPEAKER_00:I think hope is contagious. I think getting real about what you are subjecting yourself to. That's been something for me is like giving myself permission to pick and choose how I am keeping myself educated about what is happening in our country while still making sure that I can balance being hopeful and and bringing joy into my home with my children. Just because you don't read every single piece of news does not make you a bad person. It means that you are choosing hope instead of fear. And it is a choice and it's an active choice. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No, I took a complete news break for the larger part of the last year. If I heard of something, that meant it was like really, really big because I heard of it through word of mouth. And that was necessary because if you are feeling downtrodden and you just continue to expose yourself to that, you're not going to be able to get out of it. Yeah, losing hope for the future, like you lose your will to live, basically, right? And you can't do good for yourself or anyone else when you're in that state.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. For me, when I realized that things are written a certain way, headlines are worded a certain way to evoke fear and confusion and doubt. That really empowered me to be very clear about how I choose how I get my news. People on TikTok and Instagram, even these 24-hour websites, they need eyeballs because they want advertising money. And people click things more when they're afraid because they want more information. So that really empowered me and also feel like I gave myself more permission to be like, okay, I'm probably not even getting the real story if I'm inundating myself with all of these headlines and all of these things. I can wait for the dust to settle a little bit. I think I've shouted out before, but really my my main news source is this newsletter called Tangle. I have found it to be just truly the most non-partisan, just the facts way of presenting the news. And I've really appreciated it. But there are still days where I'm like, I'm not opening Tangle today. Goodbye. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:If I really just want to get an update on what's going on, AP News, Associated Press. It's not sexy. It's just that bare bones. Like it's the source that other news sources draw from. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Just make sure that you're empowering yourself however you need to to continue being hopeful and existing in today's world because we need your hope. We don't need your fear. They need your fear. We need your hope. Back to Michelle. Before we get further into Barack Obama's presidency and how that shaped her life, there's a moment in the middle of her memoir when she loses a really good friend, really young, to cancer. Her friend dies at 26. She writes, I'm not sure that I ever believed that life was fair, but I had always thought that you could work your way out of just about any problem. Suzanne's cancer was the first real challenge to that notion, a sabotage of my ideals. Have you ever experienced a sabotage of your ideals, James? Like when did you first realize that life was unfair? And then now how do you move through life with that information?
SPEAKER_01:This also makes me think of just like experiencing cognitive dissonance for the first time, right? Where like you have this belief and then something happens, or you're given new information that challenges that belief, and then you're like, whoa, uh, what do I do with this? What do I do? Um, and the thing that kind of pops into my mind around this being in high school and kind of coming towards graduation and seeing who in our in our class was going to college, who was going into the military, who was going into the workforce, or you know, community college, and realizing that there was a really distinct line there based on race and based on economic status of one's family, like things that people cannot control, right? You're born into the family, you're born into. Yeah, realizing my privilege in a big way. And that it wasn't, I worked hard, yes, but I had um I had a leg up, right? Being a white kid from a middle class family, child of college graduates. So yeah, that that realization of like, not that I couldn't, right? I mean, Michelle clearly she grew up in the south side of Chicago as a black woman and achieved far more than than I have educationally or career-wise, but she she's exceptional.
SPEAKER_00:And she also had a support system in place, too, that maybe some of these people from high school that we went to high school with didn't. Did they have that encouragement? Did they have that person saying, you can do this?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Realizing that the playing field is not level and you have to work so much harder if you don't come from a privilege to have the same or similar outcomes. Like that epiphany is one that I hadn't really had prior to that. And it kind of was the catalyst for me studying what I chose to study in college, which urban studies and sociology, and then getting into nonprofit work, trying to do what I could, what I can to fight for for true equity and not just equality or sameness.
SPEAKER_00:I think I had that epiphany a little bit later in college, actually. But it's a it's a good epiphany to have. And then I love that you decided, like, okay, once I know this about the world, what can I do about it? I've always been very impressed by your journey and what you do and and how you've tried to make the world a better place. So and we're about to get right into how Michelle and Barack make the world a better place. We discussed journaling in the quick topics, and it's at this point in her life where Michelle starts to do that because she's kind of having these epiphanies and she needs to work through them. She wants to get real with herself. She's with a partner who is so clear about who he is and what he wants to do with his life. And he constantly questions her. Thanks. Have we all done that? I don't know. I like this idea too. Like, what pains you? Do you do you pay attention to the things in the world that you feel like are unfair and are painful so that you can do something about it?
SPEAKER_01:It also makes me think that like what motivates you, what your passions are, right? That can change over time. And I can say, like right now, I'm I'm kind of in a period of revisiting that and seeing like who am I now? Right. What what is still true that has always been true about me and what what is different and trying to figure out like what impact I want to make and where I want to make it. I think I'm starting to think more around like localized community sort of impact. Just because that feels like more tangible. I'm interested in returning to get more involved in local nonprofit than the last five plus years I've been working for national nonprofits.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. That can be a very scary place to be too, because once you feel like you're in a lane, it can be really hard to switch lanes depending on your different responsibilities. But Michelle does the exact same thing. She's been working for this law firm and she kind of realizes this is not how I want to live the rest of my life. She's unfulfilled at her job, but she has her mother telling her, make the money first and then worry about the happiness later. I understand where her mother comes from because I don't necessarily think her mother had the privilege to choose between money and happiness. And not all of us do. So how do we make sure that we're still living that authentic life while also being responsible?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Her mom is giving this wisdom because it's informed by her own life experiences and her life is different than Michelle's life. So ultimately it was up to Michelle whether or not to take that advice and put it to practice. And I think, you know, as we receive advice from others in our lives, we always need to be mindful of like no one is unbiased, right? It's even if it's well intentioned, it's coming from from their own perspective. So why might that be per their perspective is important to consider. And then ultimately, like, you gotta do what's right for you. And I and I don't think with like big decisions like in life, like leaving a law firm, it's not always a right and wrong. It's just a choice. And which one can you get behind the most, really?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. We can even call it back to the very beginning when we talked about how her parents taught her about context really early on. There's context to everything. There's context that informs her mother's wisdom, like you just said. During this point in her life, Michelle also watches her father very stubbornly battle MS. He continues to tell everyone he's fine, but he passes away. And she's reeling from this loss plus her friend's death. She writes, losing my dad exacerbated my sense that there was no time to sit around and ponder how my life should go. The lesson was simple: life is short and not to be wasted. My mom said that a lot to me too, growing up. My mom had, I'm realizing like the older I get, I'm like, my mom had a lot of cliched isms that I think you hear a lot, like and they're not just uh singular to her. She would say, Life is short. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I mean, my mom really did encourage me in her own way to live very presently and to choose a happy life. And um, I am grateful for that.
SPEAKER_01:I feel like you need to capture those words of wisdom from her for your kids now. Like, yeah, you know, yeah, that'd be cool to look back on. But um, I'm also thinking like she was probably about our age when she started giving you those isms, which is pretty funny because she still had and has plenty of life ahead of her, right?
SPEAKER_00:She had lost would have lost her father in the next couple of years at this point. And I think that I think that was a big turning point from my mom. Yeah. I losing a parent, I can't I can't imagine that. Right. And for Michelle, too. I mean, it must just be heartbreaking. Right. Especially because he her father specifically was so adamant about being fine that I don't think he ever really let on just how much pain he was in. And to have such a stoic figure in your life fall without being real about the situation.
SPEAKER_01:Would she have taken the leap to leave the law firm if those losses hadn't happened? Like, who knows? Who knows?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But she does. She makes her move and Barack supports her 100%. So that's that's gotta be helpful, a supportive partner. She finds a job at City Hall and she starts working there shortly after getting engaged to Barack. They get married, and right after their honeymoon, Barack flies to Bali to spend five weeks alone working on his book, This is the Dreams of My Father. Michelle writes that adapting is key to a successful marriage. At her job, Michelle is tasked as the executive director to create the Chicago chapter of an organization called Public Allies, which is also a startup company, a similar model to Teach for America, James, which I know you know all about. Public Allies trains and mentors young people and then places them in paid apprentice positions inside community organizations and public agencies. And Michelle feels a lot of pressure. She writes, success or failure depended entirely on my efforts. But she writes about enjoying the process, celebrating the learning, and that 25 years after its inception, public allies is still going strong. And for the first time in her life, Michelle feels like she's doing something meaningful. Okay, so she details in her memoir Barack's run-up to the White House. First, he becomes a senator of Illinois, and then ultimately, as we all know, he goes on to serve two terms as president. She's really honest about the strain that career that Barack's career ambitions has on her and her family. She shares their early struggles, the weight of parenting, even their decision to go to marriage counseling. She willingly takes on what she knows is going to be a brutal moment for their family. They're separated for long lengths of time on campaign trails, the spotlight from harassing media, and sometimes a very cruel and judgmental public. She writes, each campaign had put a little dent in my soul and also our marriage. A presidential run I feared would really bang us up. But she does it for him. And even though she writes that she thought he'd never win, black man in America, she has faith in his message and his purpose. There are a few things that really struck me during this section of her memoir. Her internal struggle to place weight on her own happiness, even if that didn't necessarily align with financial stability, which ultimately it did, but taking that leap was scary for her, as we just talked about. And then as they start a family and support Barack, she's very forthcoming about the invisible labor of women, how women are expected to hold everything and everyone together, even if they're falling apart. She's held to this impossible standard, especially as a black woman. And we'll get more into that in our next section. But her memoir really captures the phrase, like I said earlier, behind every man is a great woman. In Michelle's case, a wonderful, hardworking, kind, sacrificing, uplifting, depleted, harassed, strong woman. I'll pause here to say like her memoir is really long, and it was really hard to like narrow it down. I highly recommend it. It's really fascinating to learn about her life. And she she's a great writer. I mean, it's it reads really easily. But obviously, for our sake and purposes here today, we have to kind of like get to the themes of stuff. Do you have anything from that section, James, that you wanna that you remembered?
SPEAKER_01:More weed smoking stories or you know, in addition to to learning about her smoking weed in her youth, finding out that she ultimately agreed, thinking that Barack would not win, like that was uh enlightening moment. But yeah, I think you know what my takeaway from that was is she knew like there was nobody at the time better than her husband, better suited than her husband to lead our country. And as a citizen, of course, she wanted him to be the president, but as his wife and the mother of his children, right? There's that personal side of it. And, you know, they've been out of the White House for some years now, but like their lives are forever changed, right? As individuals, they will have secret service for the rest of their life. Um, you know, she will be subject to public scrutiny for the rest of her life, but also public adoration, right? So I don't know. I I have not read her second book. So I don't know if she gets at like knowing what they know now. Would she still do it? But I think I hope the answer would be yes, because I think even though we're in a valley of a time as a country and in Trump's America, I think we're still better off for having had Barack Obama as president. And I think that line graph I was talking about earlier and that like progress not always being linear, I think that was like a really key pivotal moment that that we're gonna see positive butterfly effects from in the years to come, I hope.
SPEAKER_00:I hope so too. I think had Barack Obama been a white man, it would be a very, very different situation with all his same ideals, all his same platforms. And I think that that's something as a country that we we do need to reckon with. Why have we had potentially this reaction? Uh, because the color of his skin, and we talked about that earlier. But I truly enjoyed learning about their courtship and the way that she just unabashedly chose to support and love her husband at great sacrifice at times for herself and for her children, which is a really big ask. But that's also how much she loved and loves her country and the people of this country. You know, we'll get into in in becoming more. She has a couple of, she talks about the the snafus, the the things that she would say that would be spun a different direction. And at one point she's called unpatriotic. And it's just like, how dare you? This woman gave everything, including her husband, her safety for this country. And so it's like, no, no, this lady has never been an ounce of unpatriotic. I think being a true patriot of your country is again taking accountability and acknowledging when things aren't perfect, and no country is perfect. No country is doing everything the exact right way that serves all of its citizens equally. I don't know. I think that's been a thing too in Trump's America. Like if you dare say that you disagree with something going on, like you're unpatriotic. And it's like, no, you don't get to claim patriotism for one side or the other, especially with the way that our country was founded and the principles it was founded upon. All right, becoming more. This part of her memoir is about visibility and the cost that comes with it, especially for a black woman. She used fashion, authenticity, and even humor as power tools. So now we enter the White House and how she chose to shape the role of first lady instead of letting the role shape her. She writes, I was humbled and excited to be the first lady, but not for one second did I think I'd be sliding into some glamorous, easy role. Nobody who has the words first and black attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I'd need to climb my way into favor. Confidence, I'd learned, sometimes needs to be called from within. I've repeated the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs. Am I good enough? Yes, I am. How do you cultivate confidence for yourself, James?
SPEAKER_01:I feel like we touched on a related topic earlier, and you know, kind of similar. Yeah. Yeah. And similar to how you cultivate hope, I think you just have to continually stay in the company of others who bring that out in you and remove yourself from sources that are draining that from you.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. It it seems simple.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So Michelle finds her purpose and her message for our nation. She writes, I knew what mattered to me. I didn't want to be some sort of well-dressed ornament who showed up at parties and ribbon cuttings. I wanted to do things that were purposeful and lasting. Her first effort, a garden. This, of course, is the precursor to her campaign about healthy food. She writes, I plan to use the work we did in the garden to spark a public conversation about nutrition, especially at schools and among parents, which ideally would lead to discussions about how food was processed, labeled, and marketed and the ways that was affecting public health. And in speaking on these topics from the White House, I'd be offering an implicit challenge to the behemoth corporations in the food and beverage industry and the way they'd been doing business for decades. She writes about this idea, pushing back against corporations to improve the food system, that it had been a bipartisan effort at every level. She writes, Republicans and Democrats alike have tackled the problem at state and local levels, investing in healthy living, building more sidewalks and community gardens, a proof point that there was a common political ground to be explored. She also created initiatives like Let's Move, Let Girls Learn, and Reach Higher, but she also did something else. She showed up as herself. She writes about some of the incredibly fascinating details about life in the White House, including how this was bananas. Whatever vehicle the president rides in, a container of their blood type is stored there in case they need an emergency transfusion. That has to stem from Kennedy, I would think. That's crazy. She also writes about the kindness that Laura Bush extended to her, taking her under her wing for the transition, even though they were from different political parties. She has a lot of how did I get here moments. She's now sleeping with Monet's above her bed, but she still made her daughters make their own beds, which I liked. Of course, finally their family was all living under one roof. All right, and as we all remember, she was extremely scrutinized for her clothes, for her arms. So disgusting, honestly, the older I get and the more that I look back on that. She writes, it seemed that my clothes mattered more to people than anything I had to say. She was called an angry black woman. She was written off as unpatriotic, like I said, not proud of her country, but she handled it all with grace. She writes, I've been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. The only thing I can do is be true to myself. She writes about the extremely difficult moments, like the multiple mass shootings that occurred. Fort Hood, 13 killed, 30 injured. Sandy Hook, 26 children and six adults killed. Aurora, 12 killed, 70 injured. San Bernardino, 14 killed, 22 injured, and the Orlando nightclub shooting, 49 killed, 52 injured, among many, many others during Barack's presidency. As we know, Obama advocated for significant gun control, including executive actions to enhance background checks, but of course, the legislation had difficulty passing through Congress. She writes, grief and resilience live together. I learned this not just once as first lady, but many times over. I really liked that. I had never um I had never really put those two together. But just because you're resilient doesn't mean you don't grieve. It's not like uh one exists without the other. One kind of exists because of the other, almost, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Definitely. Like I think when you're met with grief, you can either totally shut down, right? Or plays plays forward. And sometimes it's probably often is a combination of the two, right? Maybe you shut down for a little bit, but then yeah, that resilience kicks in and you gotta move on because otherwise you're not living.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, when you're going through hell, just keep going, as they say. Throughout this section of the memoir, she really highlights the way that certain bad actors in Congress cared more about gaining or maintaining power than the American public. Lies were spread, toes were dug in. It was honestly really frustrating to read, like I said. You see the beginnings of this happen during Obama's presidency, and she details this in her memoir. After kind of telling us all of this stuff, she writes, Bear with me here, because this doesn't necessarily get easier. It would be one thing if America were a simple place with a simple story. If I could narrate my part in it only through the lens of what was orderly and sweet, if there were no steps backward, and if every sadness when it came turned out at least redemptive in the end. But that's not America, and it's not me either. I'm not going to try to bend this into any kind of perfect shape. That just really kind of encapsulates what we've been talking about already. They lived as a family, they worked through the hatred. I mean, it was it was a big thing for her to not agree because it wasn't really a choice at that point, but to realize, like, okay, when he when he wanted to run again for four more years, the stakes were even higher this time, even more scrutiny, even more hatred seeping out of the cracks. But she, like I said, she just she believed in Barak. She believed in his message and his his um hope for creating a better country for all people. She really goes into a lot, lot more detail. And I highly encourage, I know we kind of flew through this section, but the first two, there are just so many great talking points. But at the very end of her memoir, she writes this I grew up with a disabled dad in a too small house with not much money and a starting to fail neighborhood. And I also grew up surrounded by love and music and a diverseity and a country where education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it. I really love that because I think, and I've mentioned this in almost every episode, but I think mindset is everything. If you come at your life thinking of all the things that you've been robbed or all the ways you've been wronged, I think you're gonna grow bitter and you're gonna start to view the world around you from fear-based response. But if you take the time to be grateful, to cultivate that gratitude, like we talked about, whether that's journaling or just saying thank you to the higher power you believe in at the end of the day, um, staying present. I think you can either see reasons to like celebrate and love life if you look for them. And I think you can see reasons to be angry and to be scared if that's what you're looking for. Absolutely. Have you found that for yourself when you're going through a bad time? Obviously, sometimes, like you said, you need professional help. And that's great. I I wish everyone had access to that. I think that's something that I that's a reason why I lean the way that I do. I want everyone to have access to mental health if they need. But I have found for me that if I'm in a stuck in a rut, it's because I've been focusing on all the bad things going on in life. And if I can just like take that moment to pause and reflect and think about the good things, then it does. It it shifts my mentality and my emotional state of being pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_01:That makes me think of um a term that I believe was coined by Adam Grant. He talks about pronoia being the opposite of paranoia and how if you choose to kind of intentionally focus on the good, to your point, that feeds itself over time versus paranoia. If you focus on the bad, you just become increasingly paranoid. So yeah, it's easier said than done, but uh absolutely good reminder because the truth is like the world isn't all good or all bad. People aren't all good or all bad. We are a combination of things to varying degrees, right? Some people won't name names, are pretty bad, 99% bad, but you know, still love their kids or something. I don't know. But um, yeah, what do you what how do you want to experience the world and recognizing that while you can't control the things you think, you can control what you say and what you do, and ultimately those things impact how you feel.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. So how does Michelle think we are constantly becoming? She writes that there is a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice, and there's a grace in being willing to know and hear others. This for me is how we become. I think right now we're being told that we're all really different from one another and we believe different things potentially. It's uh, but to your point, even Gloria Steinem has said there's probably something that you can find to agree on with every single person in this world. But if you go out looking at someone like they're the enemy just because they're different than you, then they're gonna feel like the enemy. And I don't really want to go through life feeling like there's a bunch of enemies. I have I have a bunch of enemies, you know? Right. It takes being the bigger person sometimes. And I think there is a difference between like, I think you can still have boundaries. If someone shows you who they are, believe them. Hate is such a heavy burden to carry. And that's that's a lesson that I've taken so much too with a lot of these memoirs. At the end of the day, this is your life, and how you choose to go through it can either be harmful or helpful for you and for the world that you're trying to build for yourself and for the people you love. This memoir felt like sitting across from a lifelong mentor, wise, poised, unapologetically real. It isn't just a story of a first lady, it's a story of a girl who grew up in a working-class neighborhood and dared to dream bigger, work hard, and live with intention. Intentionally living. I just really like that. And I felt like she really clarified that for me, how to do that or how she did that and reflected ways that maybe I can do that too. In her memoir, her voice is honest, elegant, and refreshingly grounded. And she really wants us all to leave with this idea that our story matters. Even if we don't think it's big enough or polished enough or loud enough, we can be powerful and vulnerable. Those things are not opposites. Michelle did not want to become a political figure, yet she became one and she did the best with what she had to make the world a better place. And if becoming really taught us anything, it's that identity is not a fixed point. Like you said, James, we're always evolving. It's a story we're continuing to write. So whether in you're in your first chapter or your fifth rewrite, remember you're always allowed to change, to grow, and to become. Do you have any takeaways?
SPEAKER_01:I'll just say that this book, I already had such respect for Michelle Obama. But after reading this, I was just like in awe of her tenfold. And for the sake of our country, I do wish that she would run for office, but I do not think we will see that because she's gotta, you know, protect her peace. And and as a fellow woman who wants her to have what's best for her, I respect that. But even though she won't run directly, you know, she still holds a lot of sway. And I think we'll we we will continue to hear from her in the years to come.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, she does explicitly say she will not ever be running for office in the memoir. She's like, let me just, this is a question that a lot of people are asking, let me just tell you. Yeah, I think she's a very influential person. I think she's the right type of influential person. So I appreciate when, in my opinion, the right type of influential people have a platform. Before I let you guys all know what's coming next week, I just want to give one last quote, because I really appreciated this quote. She is talking about moving forward, pushing through this valley, as you've called it, Jamie, this time in our country's history. She writes, What I won't allow myself to do is become cynical. In my most worried moments, I take a breath and remind myself of the dignity and decency I've seen in people throughout my life, the many obstacles that have already been overcome. I hope others will do the same. We all play a role in this democracy. I continue too to keep myself connected to a force that's larger and more potent than any one election or a leader or a news story, and that's optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.
SPEAKER_01:That's beautiful. And that makes me feel inspired to like there's keeping a gratitude list, gratitude journal, but maybe just keeping some sort of list of wins, big and small, just to not lose sight of the things that have gone in our favor individually or collectively over time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I love that. That's a great idea. I so appreciate you coming on the show, Jamie, and talking about Michelle Obama's becoming with me. I'm glad to be becoming with you. I feel like you just continue to inspire me and encourage me to think differently and and think about the ways that I want to be a good parent. And you always come with these great quotes or one-liners or just ways, ways of thinking about something that maybe I hadn't, or a way of articulating something just so succinctly and and simply that it's so much easier for me to take into my life. So I just really appreciate you. Oh, thank you. I appreciate you too. Your friendship is one of my big wins in life. Yes. Next week, author Ashley Russell stops by the podcast to chat about her lovely food war, what's cooking good looking. It's such a fun, delightful episode about family and those wonderful moments around the dinner table. You won't want to miss it. If you love this episode, please leave a review, share it with a friend, and don't forget to subscribe. You can find links, quotes, and other memoir magic at babesandbookland.com or on our Instagram, Babes in Bookland Pod. Thanks for listening. Have a joyful holiday season. Jamie, I love you. Love you. Bye, babe. Bye, buddy, I'm not sure.
