Meeting Nelson Mandela gave me the perspective I needed a couple of years into our White House journey – that real change happens slowly, not just over months and years but over decades and lifetimes.
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.
There are simply other ways of being.
I will always wonder about what led so many women in particular to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. The result was now ours to live with.
What I won’t allow myself to do, though, is to 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.
The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke.
She’d quietly supported every choice I’d ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit her turn signal to get us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first and worry about your happiness later.
There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
On my way, I was learning, was the product of Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a geo-locator but rather a state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to stop in to have one last forty-five-minute conversation with a colleague before he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but forgot to mention that he was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym.
I didn’t want the details: I just wanted to know how to feel.
The first thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.