Even when it’s not pretty or perfect, Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
It turns out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant. Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
To me, there was magic in the learning.
I’d known just enough loss by then to know that there was more coming.
My mother was a force. She had little tolerance for fools, she kept her hair short and wore practical non-fussy clothes. Everything about her radiated confidence and calm.
I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news story––and that’s OPTIMISM. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.
Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.
I endured misery for the sake of appearances.
There are truths we face and truths we ignore.
There’s something innately bolstering about a person who sees his opportunities as endless, who doesn’t waste time or energy questioning whether they will ever dry up.
I’d allowed myself to get trapped in my own head.
If you’ve never passed a winter in Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a hundred straight days beneath an iron-gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and daytime, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There’s ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped.
If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself into a passive role, waiting for Barack’s team to give me direction.
They aren’t “bad kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.
Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.
If you tap into your true story, and share that truth, it resonates with people.
Education had been the primary instrument of change in my own life, my lever upward in the world.
I felt the warm tug of the past and the melancholy of absence – all of it a little jarring, accustomed as I was to the hermetic and youthful world of college. It was something deeper than what I normally felt at school, the slow shift of generational gears.
My purpose had always been to see past my neighborhood – to look ahead and overcome.
I couldn’t help but notice who among my friends had more bracelets or Barbies than I did, or who got to buy their clothes at the mall instead of having a mom who sewed everything on the cheap using Butterick patterns at home. As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.