The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities – in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal.
For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal. I.
The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else.
It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
Studying in countries like China isn’t only about your prospects in the global marketplace. It’s not just about whether you can compete with your peers in other countries to make America stronger. It’s also about whether you can come together and work together with them to make our world stronger. It’s about the friendships you make, the bonds of trust you establish and the image of America that you project to the rest of the world.
The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate – kind of unflappable Zen neutrality... She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring... When we’d done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did.
Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of Barack across the room, in the grips of what looked to be an endless conversation with the woman, who was doing a large portion of the talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d like to be rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself.
That day, I stared for a few extra seconds at the little oblong bubble next to my husband’s name for president of the United States. After almost twenty-one months of campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it – the last thing I needed to do. Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?
I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel.
It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress.
But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting – a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.
It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes.