MICHELLE OBAMA!
March 28, 2023
Abby Wambach:
People.
Michelle Obama:
What’s happening? I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.
Abby Wambach:
Same.
Michelle Obama:
Look at you guys.
Glennon Doyle:
Look at you. We are so unbelievably grateful that you trusted us with us.
Michelle Obama:
Oh my gosh. Oh my God. More than you can imagine. My husband is like, “Oh,” when I told him I was going to do this. He was like, “Oh, they’re pretty good.” He probably didn’t sound exactly like that, but …
Glennon Doyle:
We will take it. We’ll take it.
Michelle Obama:
Okay. I’m all yours.
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to the most thrilling day we’ve ever had. Long ago when sister and Abby and I heard that Mrs. Obama had a new book coming out, I remember saying to sister on the phone, “Just please God let it be like here’s everything I know about how to human.” That’s what I said to my sister. And it is. Mrs. Obama’s newest, glorious book, The Light We Carry, is about how she humans. Woven through her deeply intimate stories are her personal human name tools, her concrete strategies for navigating life, marriage, motherhood, and career with grace and grit, with toughness and tenderness. Mrs. Obama believes that everyone has a light and her book and accompanying new show, The Light podcast, is about ways to protect and rekindle our light, see and amplify the light in others, and light up the world together. We are outrageously honored that Mrs. Obama is joining the Pod Squad today to shine her warm life giving light on all of us. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things, Mrs. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama.
Michelle Obama:
Thank you to the Pod Squad. I am huge fans of all of you and what you’re trying to do with this conversation that you have, so this was the perfect place to come and talk about The Light We Carry. So thank you for having me. I’m thrilled and remember, call me Michelle.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, okay.
Michelle Obama:
Because we cannot have a real conversation with this Mrs. Obama stuff, so you now have permission.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay. You are so known and beloved, your husband’s so known and beloved, your mama, Marian Lewis Robinson, so known and beloved. Since reading The Light We Carry, I cannot stop thinking about your father. I fell absolutely in love with him and suddenly what was previously your inexplicable well of grace and tenacity and steadiness became explicable to me. I mourned for you that you lost him so early and I mourned for our nation that we didn’t have the chance to know him and love him. I just wondered if you could tell us about Frazier Robinson III and how the way he lived every day shaped your understanding of life.
Michelle Obama:
Wow, that’s a beautiful way to start because I introduced my dad in Becoming, but this book allowed me to really dive into the lessons that both he and my mom have taught me that keep me upright. If they were alive, they would have their podcast, if I could convince them that their wisdom was actually valuable, which my mother still doesn’t believe, so this is my way of sharing some of those little tidbits. But my dad, as you could hear in the story that I tell about him, he’s really a special, special man. The older I get, the more that I realize how fortunate Craig and I were to be parented by these two amazing people. But when I think about my dad, especially in these times when there is so much anxiety, so much FOMO, so many people who seem to be dissatisfied with their lives, my dad lived the opposite way.
Michelle Obama:
For many reasons, in this day and age, he had every reason to feel dissatisfied, disappointed, shaken, anxious about his life. He was a Black man that grew up in some of the most segregated times of this country. Although he was incredibly talented and gifted, he was an artist, a sculptor, he got a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, but he couldn’t attend because that’s not what men did, especially if you were working class. He needed to get a job and support his family. He didn’t come from the kind of background where he had parents who would understand investing in art. He had this thing in him, but he couldn’t go to college. He had to get a job, and my father had a disability. It was MS, it affected his ability to walk, but he didn’t have it his whole life.
Michelle Obama:
He grew up with the ability to walk. He was an athlete. He was a boxer, he was a swimmer. He was a very active, engaged man, and then he couldn’t walk without the assistance of a cane, crutches. If you were to lay out someone in these times who should bemoan their life and their fate, it would be somebody like my father. But he lived just the opposite. He was the kind of person who lived by the motto that’s like you count your blessings. I talk about in the book how the one thing he used to say to us as kind of an admonition to me and my brother is when we ever did something where it seemed like we were looking at the other person’s plate, he’d say, “Never satisfied.” I mean, that still rings through my head every day. Never satisfied. If you wanted an extra scoop of ice cream, “Never satisfied.”
Michelle Obama:
He taught us to value what was on our plate. And when I talk to my kids, Malia and Sasha these days, one of the things that I remind them is that one of the gifts my parents have is that they have learned to be content, self content. To be satisfied with where they are now at the moment and not looking over at the grass is always greener. My father lived that way, and as a result, he was one of the happiest people that I knew because he valued what he had. He didn’t look at what the other guy had and worry, well, he didn’t measure himself against somebody else’s values. I think that’s a gift, and it’s a gift that I try to mirror because the truth is I know some of the most powerful, wealthy, famous people, you name them, I probably have met them, many of them are my friends, they’re not the happiest people I know.
Michelle Obama:
Because when you’re always wanting something else, when there’s a hole that you can’t fill in yourself, you’re never satisfied. But my father, Frazier Robinson, he was a uniquely satisfied man, and I think that’s probably the best way to introduce him in this conversation.
Abby Wambach:
You’re transparent that a public political life was maybe not your first choice or second or third life choice, and that you decided to take your foot off the gas on your own career because of how you wanted your family to operate. You call your husband your greatest disruptor, and you say that marriage is an ever evolving compromise. So we need to know what compromises has he made to make your relationship work, and how are you a disruptor of his life?
Michelle Obama:
Well, first, can I get just an amen on that word, compromise? I share that because I meet so many young people who haven’t grasped that about the challenge of marriage. I see so many people lunging towards the ceremony, especially in this day and age. There’s so much emphasis placed on the proposal and the balloon thing, and everybody’s getting engaged 12 different places, and they’ve got 12 dresses and they’ve got these idea pages and flowers, and all I do is shake my head and go, “Ooh, you are going to be so surprised when the real of marriage hits,” all the hard work because it seemed like a party, a show and in this day and age, that’s what we show people about marriage. Folks like me and Barack, I joke that we’re hashtag couples goals. People see us in our best state. The fist bumps, the high-fives, the family going to church.
Michelle Obama:
We show our best selves all the time, sadly, and so I think it confuses people when we’re not completely honest, and so I find that young people give up on marriage too early because they think that it’s all about the great moments, and it’s really about pushing through the tough moments. If we don’t share those, if couples like me and Barack don’t share those times, then we’re not really giving the best advice that we can. So compromise is right in the middle of it all. And people look at what I’ve done, because I’ve been so vocal about the fact that I wasn’t interested in politics. It looks like I’m the one that’s the primary person who’s compromised, and because I’m the woman in this relationship, generally that is the case.
Michelle Obama:
But the truth is that Barack is compromised in big and small ways throughout our relationship. I mean, just on the temperament side, we are totally different people. I love being around people all the time. I can talk to people all day all the time. I’m never exhausted from company. That’s just my natural personality. Barack loves people, but he also is more of a loner. He likes that time to himself. He’s had to compromise and come to the middle lawn, “Come out of your hole for a minute. Let’s talk.”
Michelle Obama:
One of the things I shared when we were first dating, because we were long distance after he went back to law school because he was going into a second year, and I was still practicing, but he told me, he is like, “I’m not much of a phone guy,” and I’m like, “Oh-“
Amanda Doyle:
You’re about to be.
Michelle Obama:
You’re about to be a phone guy because if this is going to work, you know are going to be talking to me every night for hours. Lo and behold, he became a phone guy. Maybe I was talking more than he was, maybe he was doing more listening … so those are just temperamentally come to these relationships as completely different people. I talk about him being a swerver, and I was the person that liked my feet to the ground and dinner every night at a certain time. He had to compromise on how our family was shaped. I think I was right in many of those decisions, as I always think I am, but I think he’s had a step back on decisions that I’ve made for our children, because a lot of times he wasn’t there. He has backed me on some crazy decisions. Malia’s first major punishment for something that she did, I grounded her for a semester.
Abby Wambach:
Whoa.
Michelle Obama:
That was his first reaction. He was like, “Ooh, a semester?” And I was like, “Yeah, a semester. That seems right.”
Amanda Doyle:
That’s a nice round number.
Michelle Obama:
I can see in his eyes … a nice round number, and he was sort of like, “Might be a little harsh, but if you said it, we’re going to go with it,” and he went with it and I was wrong. It was way too long. It had no effect. But that’s another story. Even in the way we raise kids and the decisions that we make, he knows that he’s got to have my back, especially we’ve got to be that united front. So he doesn’t always agree, but he won’t disagree with me in front of the kids. His compromises really allowed me to step back in those times that I wanted to step back. I talk in Becoming about the decision I made to walk away from a very lucrative corporate law career to work in the city, and then nonprofits and all of those decisions of mine, you guys, were financially problematic because we had the same amount of debt, but each job I took, I made less money.
Michelle Obama:
The only way I could do that, and he and I together could still pay down our school debt, was that he took on more of the financial responsibility. At one point, when he was a state senator, he was literally holding down three full separate careers. He was a state senator, he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, taught two courses, one in con law. He taught con law while he was state senator.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my God.
Michelle Obama:
And he was still doing appellate work at a law firm so that I could make less money, so that I could make the choice to work part time when I had the girls. There are so many ways that-
Amanda Doyle:
That’s like what your dad did with your mom.
Michelle Obama:
Yeah. Let me tell you, that’s one of the reasons why I fell in love with my husband. At his core, he reminded me of my father, this honorable, decent, he is who he says he is kind of person. Doesn’t care about the external stuff, doesn’t sweat the small stuff. I was just so happy that my father got a chance to meet Barack before he passed. My father couldn’t walk me down the aisle, but Barack got his blessing and that meant the world to me. So my husband compromises, even though I don’t always talk about it.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, you don’t need to talk about it too much.
Michelle Obama:
Why should I talk about it too much?
Amanda Doyle:
I want to give you my big, big amen because it means so much at such a personal level to hear you be so open about what it takes to walk a long marriage. Because when you hear and see you as part of this iconic couple talking so openly and courageously about your struggles, it really shifts something fundamentally in someone like me who may hypothetically have been thinking I was doing it all wrong and I am now like, “Maybe I wasn’t doing it all wrong. Maybe this is just how it is.” So I deeply, deeply thank you for that because I agree with you that people aren’t doing that in the world and it’s so important. I wondered if you could share with us more about what the challenges of having young kids are on a marriage and-
Michelle Obama:
Oh my goodness.
Amanda Doyle:
And what are the gifts of a long partnership on the other side of, say, a decade of not being able to stand each other?
Michelle Obama:
Well, this is what we don’t talk about. I joke about it all the time. If I were to track the hardest years of our marriage, the times when I was most resentful, was the time when the kids were little? Because they suck the oxygen out of all living things.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Can that be your next book?
Michelle Obama:
They suck the oxygen out of all living things. Yes, that’s a good working title. But nobody tells you that and I had to work hard to have my children. I wanted them desperately. I wrote in Becoming, we went through IVF, we had unexplained infertility as more and more people are doing it, it wasn’t unexplained. We were in our 30s trying to get pregnant, but nobody talked about that. You just felt bad in the moment. You felt like you were broken in some way. So just that emotional trauma alone, how that impacts a marriage … because nobody talked about it, I don’t think that we had the tools to know how much of a challenge that was for us. I was feeling bad about myself. I was depressed. I had a miscarriage. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t get pregnant. It was one of these things, when you’re a hard driving person, you decide what you want and then you go after it and you get it, and then the one thing you want, that you really, really want, it’s out of your control.
Michelle Obama:
That was one of the first experiences that I had, so I was going through stuff. We don’t talk about postpartum. I don’t think I had it, but who knows? We never talked about what having kids does to your hormones. We didn’t have the language. We didn’t have the knowledge. So let’s just start there.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s before they even arrived.
Michelle Obama:
That’s before they even get here. And breastfeeding-
Glennon Doyle:
So hard.
Michelle Obama:
Doesn’t work out right, so who you mad at? Him.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Michelle Obama:
It’s like, “You can’t help me. What are you doing?” There’s so many ways that kids are hard on life, but we can’t say that out loud because we love them. As Barack and I say, that’s why God makes them cute. But there’s just this thing about them. You can’t be mad at them because of them, so who are you going to take it out on? You take it out on each other. The sleepless nights, the worries. I mean, the endless worries. My kids will be 22 and 25 this year. Let’s just stop there. That’s kind of shocking. Those two little people, they’re grown women in the world. They are away from us and you would think that that would create less stress, but no, more stress, because guess what? They’re out there on their own, taking planes, living in apartments, driving cars, having relationships. It never ends. No one tells you about this. They just say, “Have a baby. It’s going to be great. It’s going to bring you together.” No, it’s very hard because you love them.
Michelle Obama:
So I think that we got to talk about that so that when young couples do run into those struggles, they don’t think that they’re broken. It’s like, no, this is the hardest thing you’re doing. Marrying another individual, melding two lives, two different ways of being and then adding more life into that mix. Then you don’t even know what kind of kids you’re going to get, because that’s another thing they don’t tell you. You have one, maybe you think you’re a great parent, right? You’re like, “Ooh, I got this down,” and then the second one shows up and they’re not having any of your first child decisions. They don’t even abide by that. Let me not talk because I want to hear that I’m not crazy.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I just feel that so much. I mean, I really thought I was a really good parent when I had my first kid. I did. People would complain and I’d be like, “Oh my God.” Then I had the second and I was like, “Oh, this has nothing to do with me.”
Amanda Doyle:
That’s right. It’s the good news and the bad news.
Michelle Obama:
Barack goes through that because our first, Malia … they’re both brilliant, of course, Malia was more of the … she’s more an appeaser. She’s a people pleaser. She was in many ways, so I think Barack thought that he was really interesting to young people. The difference in when they were teenagers, where Malia would say, “All right, I’m going out this weekend. I think I need to go in and give Dad 15 minutes.” She would go into a treaty room in the White House and she’d ask him, “So tell me about Syria, and I saw that you gave a speech on blah, blah, blah.” She’d just go in and he’d come out with his chest pumped up and I’d be like, “Do you know where she’s going this weekend?” He was like, “Oh no. I didn’t even ask.” It’s like, “Ooh, ooh, that’s some jujitsu on you because you were so thrilled with the fact that she took interest in your presidency that you don’t even know what she’s doing.” Right?
Michelle Obama:
Then Sasha shows up and Sasha’s totally like, “Don’t touch me. Don’t look my way. I don’t need to please you. You’re annoying.” He got a lot of that. He was stunned. I would tell him, “She’s going to come around,” and now at 21, they just got off the phone last night, she called him looking for advice and it just took her longer. But he was devastated. We used to joke. He’s like … Barack is so scared of Sasha, he’s so desperately trying to win her approval and she was having none of it. It’s like that they’re different kids and so that can take you for a loop, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Michelle Obama:
When you don’t know how they think the way they do, and if you care too much about them liking you, you’re already losing.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So what I hear you saying then is the inverse of that is if they don’t like us, we’re nailing it. Right?
Michelle Obama:
Or you want some balance of it, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, yes.
Michelle Obama:
One of my sayings, which you hear myself saying it, it’s like, “Don’t talk to me that way. I’m not one of your little friends.” It’s like, we’re not friends. I love you. I love you desperately, but we’re not on the same plane. They don’t even want you to be on the same plane. They want boundaries and authority. So I urge young people who are thinking about having kids, it’s like, think about why you’re having kids. Because in my view, we’re not supposed to have kids to fulfill something in us that we’re missing. As my mom, Marian Robinson, said, we are here as parents to raise individuals, and we have to be thinking along those lines, and if you have have a baby because you need a friend, well, you’re going to be sorely disappointed because with your friends, you make accommodations for your friends.
Michelle Obama:
With kids, you can’t make accommodations. They’re three, four, they’re unreasonable, they don’t know anything. I mean, they have no facts, no logic. So we can’t treat them like they have since all the time. I mean, we want to treat them like they’re capable. In my view, kids aren’t supposed to be your friends because the job is too big to worry about whether they like you or not, and no matter what you do, they will find a reason not like to you. That’s their job, to push against us. If we get pushed a little bit and we cave, well, then we’re giving them no foundation. We’re giving them no base and a lot of times that’s what they’re testing. They’re trying to test, can I push you like I can push my friends? The answer has to be, no, absolutely not. There’s some consistency, there’s some predictability in how I’m going to react to you and we don’t do that with our friends.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. You mentioned your mom. On this podcast, we’re always asking this question of, are we supposed to change our kid for the world, or are we supposed to change the world for our kid? Okay, this is a repetitive theme. You, through your mother’s wisdom, give us a third way, which rocked all of our worlds and is one of the many things about the book we haven’t stopped talking about. You write that whenever you or your brother complained about how people in the world were responding to you, who liked you and who didn’t, your mother would say, “Come home, we will always like you here.”
Michelle Obama:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s simple and so not simple. It’s such a brilliant way of refusing to either change other people to like your kid or change your kid to be more likable. Instead, it’s just offering your very self as a safe, accepting, celebratory sanctuary from this unpredictable, uncontrollable world. How did knowing come home, we will always like you here help shape who you are?
Michelle Obama:
Wow. Profoundly. Profoundly. Because when you have a base of love, and not everyone has it, right? You have a place to come where people are glad to see you. They’re happy to hear your voice. They’re happy that you’re alive. I grew up with that. It didn’t take away the pains, the fears, the hurts of the world, but it gave me a safe place to land, to lick my wounds, to build up my courage to go back out into the inevitable chaos. That is more powerful than book knowledge. What I find myself falling back on and have fallen back on throughout my life, it’s that general enoughness that my parents gave me at home that helped me settle myself and learn how to heal myself from the inevitable flux of the world.
Michelle Obama:
I fall back on it to this day, I try to emulate it with my own kids, I try to replicate it for kids that I come in contact with. Just this notion of we cannot control the world, nor should we. All we can do is control our own selves to protect our own light, but if no one has shown us the value of our light, it’s hard to do it if we didn’t. It doesn’t have to be apparent. I say that because I know that there are people who don’t have it in their homes. But that light, that feeling of enoughness, that feeling of gladness can come at school from a teacher. I just want young people to search it out and to run after it whenever they see it and they recognize it, because that’s all we can control. I wish I could fix the world for my kids. I’m no different than any other mother. I am a mama bear.
Michelle Obama:
To this day, my kids come to me with a problem and the first thing I was like, “Give me a name?”
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you for that. Thank you for that.
Michelle Obama:
“Who’s she? What’s her last name?” And they’re like, “Mom, Mom, don’t start googling people.” I have that in me. I will fight to the death for my kids, but they have to live in the world, and they have to fight their own battles, and they have to know that they can. My mother was good at that. I knew she always would have my back. My parents, I could come home, I could tell them anything, I could complain. A lot of times when you’re a kid, you don’t even want them to do anything.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Michelle Obama:
You just want to be heard. My mom spent so much time doing this that I didn’t realize. It was more like, “Mmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, really? Mmm.” That was most of my conversation. I was like, “And another thing, and then …” and she let me spin like the Tasmanian devil, and I just run out of energy and she would end with, “Well, do you need me to do anything?” The answer was usually, “Well, no.” I actually felt better after letting it all out. That’s what my poor little working class home life was like. We had no money. My parents didn’t go to college. They didn’t have networks, they didn’t have any of that, but they had that enoughness in themselves to be confident that what was going on at 7436 South Euclid was just as powerful as what might have been going on in the White House or somebody else’s nicer house, that our world was secure because we had love and respect for each other. That’s so much more powerful than trying to fix the world so that your kid never experiences pain, never experiences failure.
Michelle Obama:
There’s nothing wrong with those feelings, with those experiences if they have a safe place to land and they learn how to build that for themselves as they become adults. That’s where the kitchen table comes in too. If you have it at home, now you know how to replicate it and build it for yourself when you go out in the world, because it’s not just coming from your mom, your dad, your home life. You got to know how to build relationships with people who sustain you. That’s part of that kitchen table. My parents taught me that. My relationships are just as valuable to me with my friends as they are with my parents, because I need them desperately. I need the enoughness that I get from my girlfriends. So I was able to go out into the world with that tool and that tool has sustained me through being the first Black first lady, having people call me fat and names, and meeting the bully down the street, or the professor at undergrad who didn’t think I was smart enough, or the counselor who told me I couldn’t go to Princeton.
Michelle Obama:
My attitude towards all that wasn’t that it wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t feel like I was entitled, never to experience that. But what I had was, “I’ll show you.” I will show you, because I know what failure feels like. I know how to go home and get the reassurance that I need, and I will come back and I will prove all of you wrong. To me, that’s a better tool than being hurt or being afraid or shying away from the negative things of the world inevitably has waiting for our kids out there in the world.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
How does it feel to have your girls creating that with each other right now? That they’re living together. We cannot stop talking about it. Is that the ultimate … it’s the dream, right?
Michelle Obama:
You guys, it is the best feeling in the world and my kids have … they’re already accomplishing some pretty amazing things out there. They’re great students. They remain sane in a pretty unusual childhood. They’ve managed the negative and positive attention. Great grades, gone to great colleges. But the truth is is that when I see them building community with each other and taking that out and staying connected to their friends and creating their own rituals, I don’t doubt that they can do the work that comes. I want to know that they can sustain themselves as human beings when I’m not here. Because let’s stop there. My mother, of all people, and we roll our eyes, she’s been preparing us for her death for … and she’s one of those morbid old ladies who’s like, “Well, I’m not going to be here, so you all better be able to …”
Michelle Obama:
I was like, “Oh, would you stop talking about the day you’re gone?” But she’s getting us ready because she’s like, “I don’t want my kids falling apart because I’m not here.” Now, what’s the point of that? So I find myself feeling the same sense of gratitude for my girls because I feel like they’re getting to the point where they don’t need me, and that feels good. They like me, they like us, they like being around us, but they don’t need us. I think that was our job as parents.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, that’s it.
Michelle Obama:
That’s our job.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s it.
Michelle Obama:
Not to be wanted, needed. I don’t want to be grading your papers or reading your assignments. I don’t want to go to school with you again because I don’t want to do that again. I want you to be able to handle your business. I want you to be able to handle your disputes when somebody is racist. I want you to be able to look them in the eye and know that you’re ready, and I see that in them and that gives me a great sense of relief, and that’s what I would urge all parents to think about. We can hold on and try to fix the world for our kids, but dag, if we do that, we’re going to be doing that for the rest of our lives, and that’s a lot.
Amanda Doyle:
Too much. That’s a lot. We’re already so tired from having these kids.
Michelle Obama:
We’re already exhausted and you get older, you get more exhausted. I don’t have the energy for that. I don’t want to go through a first job again. I want to watch you do it. Tell me about it. I did it already. I find that I enjoy my life more, my kids more, because I taught them to be competent and independent and we practiced it for a long time. That’s why I want parents to know, it’s like the helicoptering is something you can never let go of and that seems exhausting. It doesn’t seem like a great way to live. Let’s start getting our kids ready earlier. We can’t wait until they’re 23 and out of the house to teach them that they can get themselves up in the morning, that they can handle their homework, that they can deal with disputes at school and with their friends. Let them practice. Let them fail. Let them get hurt because that’s waiting for them.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, it is.
Michelle Obama:
If the first time they experience a loss is in their 30s, oh, they’re going to fall apart. We have to help our kids understand their way through, because this next thing is scary.
Amanda Doyle:
So much of your book is so helpful in teaching us about how to look our fears in the eye. You said that fear comes from within, which means that denying your fear almost always involves denying a part of yourself. That rings so true inside of me and it feels like since that is true, then when you’re facing a fear, whether you are succumbing to it or overcoming it, you’re always denying a part of yourself. My question is how do you know that it’s the right part of yourself to deny? How do you know if it’s the anxiety or it’s the intuition, if it’s the oppressor or the liberator? How do you identify that voice? Which part of yourself is the right part of yourself to deny?
Michelle Obama:
Ooh, it’s a deep, good question. For me, it’s practice. It’s self-knowledge and self-knowledge takes time. I think that that’s the frustrating thing about your 20s and your 30s. You don’t know because you haven’t had enough practice with yourself. Unless you have dealt with a whole lot of trauma and have been pushed in ways, and there are a lot of people out there who have had to learn a lot about themselves, and they sadly have done it without much guidance and ability or time to be self-reflective about it, but I find that that’s one of the things you learn yourself over time. I have learned by taking risks and doing hard things, that over the course of what will be coming on my 60th year of life, I’m getting better, I’m still now just getting better at making those kind of distinctions.
Michelle Obama:
I know when my fear is real and I have to pay attention to it and I know when my fear, as I write in the book, is trying to keep me stuck, is trying to keep me from growing. I’ve learned it more and more because I’ve done harder and harder things. That rollercoaster ride that you go on when you’re doing something that’s hard but not dangerous, it’s just scary, and you know that feeling when, “Ooh, I’m about to fall off this mountain,” and I just don’t want young people to think you know it right away. Because I find that young people, if they can’t distinguish it right away, they think they don’t know themselves. It’s like, well, you got to try on a few things.
Michelle Obama:
Everybody’s going to have their first. Their first time getting on a bus by themselves. You are learning something there. That’s that competence, that’s giving your kids the practice and independence. Just riding a public bus tells you some things about is it the bus ride or is it that scary dude that just got on at the third stop? What do I do under those circumstances? Do I just put my headphones down and not listen or watch or keep my eyes open? Or do I get off and run? It takes practice going away from home for the first time that, that’s a first that really tests that whole “Should I stay home and not go away to school because I don’t want to be away from the things that are familiar to me?” We all know if you’ve gotten a chance to go away to school, it could be that those first six weeks, even three months, can be horrible.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, they are. Thank you for saying that.
Michelle Obama:
You don’t know somebody. They are horrible. You don’t have a friend. You don’t know how to be alone yet. You don’t even know how to get to the library, but you don’t realize that that’s going to pass. You don’t not go to college because the first six weeks or even the first three months they’re going to be hard, because guess what? In three months you’ll make a friend, or at least you’ll know your roommate, or you’ll get used to the pace of college. That fear isn’t a fear that should stop you. Starting your first job, moving to a new city. I mean, all of that. But the more that we do, the more that I’ve done, I know in my life, the more I can make the distinction.
Michelle Obama:
But if you’re holding on to your child, to yourself, if you’re never taking that first leap, you never get to practice it. There’s so many people who live in their comfort zones forever, and they make their world small. I wrote about some of those people in my life. My grandparents were those people. Sometimes my mom can be. My mom is … well, I tease her. She’s well practiced in the art of no, because guess what? When you’re a Black woman raised on the south side of Chicago, Chicago is a very segregated city. Going out into the wrong neighborhood could mean you were going to get beat up, killed. There are some real fears there. People were more reticent about stepping outside of their family, their neighborhood.
Michelle Obama:
My mom’s got that naturally, but as she’s grown up with us, she pushed us, and now I find that I’m pushing her. It’s like, “Yes, mom, you do want to go to China with us. You do want to move into the White House. We need you. It’s going to be an interesting experience. You do want to meet the Pope for a second time. You do want to go to Venice.” I mean, look my mom’s first answer is-
Glennon Doyle:
I’ve said that so many times to my mom. I’m like, “Mom, come on. We are going to meet the Pope.”
Michelle Obama:
But her first response to everything is, “No. Why would I want to do that?”
Amanda Doyle:
Is that the flip side of being deeply satisfied? When you’re talking about a deeply satisfied in person, is it-
Michelle Obama:
Yes. It’s stuckness sometimes, and so now the test is are you satisfied or are you afraid? Which is it? These are all questions that we all have to ask ourselves, are we satisfied or are we scared of the new? I talk about that being a part of bigotry, racism, unbeknownst to some of us that we just get caught in our comfort. We block out all the new, and so now we don’t know any new, we just do the same thing all the time and we don’t realize that that newness is keeping us blocked off from other because other gets scary. Right? So as I said, when I went to places like Princeton for the first time in my life, and I realized, “Wow, there are whole places in this country that are wealthy, white, and don’t even know I exist. Oh my God.”
Michelle Obama:
These are people who have money. They live in worlds where they don’t see smart, young Black women from Chicago. They don’t even know I exist. Me realizing that, gives me more empathy because I’m like, well, it’s going to take you a minute to know that I even exist, but we need to challenge each other on those fronts because that gets dangerous when we’re only living in our safe zones. Because then we don’t know our neighbors and then that means somebody can tell us something crazy about our neighbor that’s not even true. We’re susceptible to lies and misconstrued notions. People who were afraid that Barack Obama was a terrorist, that he was a Muslim, that we were other, that our family was so different that we posed a threat to the nation.
Michelle Obama:
I don’t want to dwell on that part of ourselves, but that was a part of the challenge of being the first Black family in the White House. People didn’t know Black people. They didn’t know what we would do. How do we think? It’s so different. That fist bump that I gave him, that was a terrorist fist bump, right? It wasn’t just a, “Yo, dude, we just won.” That could be misconstrued as something dangerous. We all know people who are stuck in their sameness in that regard, and not because they’re inherently bad people. They’re just afraid. That’s why I talk about why we have to dissect our fear. I want young people to dissect their fear early so that we don’t get stuck in just what we know.
Michelle Obama:
But that takes practice. It takes constantly pushing our ourselves out of our comfort zones. How do I know? Because I’ve been doing it for 60 years now and I still don’t have it right. I still don’t always know myself. Because as I said in Becoming, we are always evolving the journey, that evolutionary process never ends. You just get a little better in it. You become comfortably afraid is what I write about in The Light. I think that’s where I am a little more self-aware, a little more comfortably afraid.
Glennon Doyle:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
You share really powerfully in the new book about the loneliness of only-ness, of being the only Black family or Black woman in a space, and you also talk about the opportunity cost of only-ness, which isn’t talked about enough. Our son’s friend recently texted me for advice from a day’s long protest at Wellesley for trans rights and when I told Abby about the text, I said to her that when Emma texted from that day’s long protest, I thought, what do you think the other kids in their English class are doing right now? They’re studying.
Michelle Obama:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Because they don’t have the extra job of demonstrating for their own existence. So who’s going to do better on Tuesday’s test? What do you tell your daughters about how to protect their precious time and energy in this world that will try to give them so many extra jobs?
Michelle Obama:
I try to explain that very principle of getting lost in the battle of explaining yourself. Your example is perfect. That’s what happens to onlys, to women, people of color in C-suites and in boardrooms and in classrooms all over the world. There’s a self-consciousness, there’s an extra weight. There’s, as I say, this tray of expectations. It’s not even just within yourself, but it’s the history that you represent. Everybody else’s hopes and dreams that you’re carrying on this tray across this tightrope, it can be exhausting. What do I say to my daughters, other young people, is first of all, let’s acknowledge that that’s happening, because so many times as an only, you feel crazy, you feel like nobody else sees this. There’s this ghost in the room that only you are experiencing and sometimes it’s just important to remind young people, “You’re not crazy. This is actually happening. It is a burden. It is not right. But it is real.”
Michelle Obama:
Acknowledging the realness of the problem for a lot of people is important. That’s why there’s so many young people who are trying to be seen. “See me, see my struggle, see my thing.” It’s important to say, but to go back to what my mom says, what I tell my girls is that this is the way the world is. We need to continue to work to change it. But you also cannot focus yourself solely on the only-ness. Nobody can help you out of that but yourself. You have to constantly remind yourself what your job is, what your point is, what your purpose is. That’s still work that you have to do in your 20s and 30s and focus as much on that as you do on fighting the battles or the past or the things that are in front of you.
Michelle Obama:
Because as you said, you have to abide your energy. You cannot take on every battle, and you can’t do it all at once. There is a pacing that has to happen, and a lot of these young people have to be told that it’s okay to pace yourself. The other thing that I remind young people is that your first and foremost, you have to do the job at hand. I tell young people that all the time. Your job as a 15-year-old, a 16-year-old, 18 year old is not to fix the economy or to fix racism. Your job is to graduate. You got to start with what’s right before you. The thing you can control. At 15, you can’t fix your whole neighborhood that is being bombarded by drugs and crime. You, 15 year old, can’t do that.
Michelle Obama:
But you can do your homework, you can go to school every day. You can focus on your own mental health so that you can get up and go to school. Because if you don’t get your education, don’t get your high school diploma, you’ll never have what you need to fight the battles when you actually have the power to do it. I constantly urge people to do the job at hand, but that doesn’t mean you are complacent. Let me say that because the young people will go back to the respectability politics and balance and patience. My own kids, they hate feeling like we’re telling them to just be patient. It’s not about being patient, it’s about being strategic with your time, with your energy. It’s about being smart. Even in the White House as First Lady, one of the most powerful positions I’ve ever had, there were only a handful of things I could do.
Michelle Obama:
If I tried to do too much, I would do nothing. That’s why I had to be strategic about picking a handful of initiatives. Let me tell you, we got letters and people were disappointed. “Why didn’t you do more on this? You never talked about that,” and you’re like, “You’re right. You’re right.” I had to say no more than I said yes. I did as much as I could to go deep and not just broad, but I was also 40 something years old. I had been used to being in a strategic place. I understood how to get things done, that you have to narrow and focus. I was practiced in that in a way that a lot of young people are still learning when they’re the onlys in these other situations.
Glennon Doyle:
It reminds me of what, sister, you said. The deep, instead of just broad, it reminds me of what you were saying.
Amanda Doyle:
I was thinking about how the whole world knows you as when they go low, we go high, and this new transformational tool that you have in this book, we have started calling when the stress goes big, we go small because the world is screaming at us, “Go big or go home. Go big or go home.” But you talk about the importance and the dignity of tending to the small, what you call what is good, simple and accomplishable. What makes the good, simple and accomplishable so important and so dignified for us to do?
Michelle Obama:
Because in my view, that’s how change happens. The real lasting change, when we look over the course of human history, yes, there’s the big wars, there’s the depression, there’s big stuff, the invention of the telephone and all of that stuff, that’s all big and we write about it. But the way the world works is that we live, we love, we bring life in. We teach from that life. It goes on and it does better than us. Small things. I was First Lady of the United States of America, but the biggest job I’ve ever had, will ever have, is raising two human beings that I’m putting out into the world, more empathetic, more compassionate. Is it glamorous? It should be more glamorous than what we make of it in this society because it’s really pretty profound what we do to raise another human being. How we interact with other human beings in the world. Right now, people are losing their minds because we’re all just being rude.
Michelle Obama:
Everybody is mad and impatient because we had a leader that led that way. We pretended like it didn’t matter. But it does. It matters how you lead. It matters how you show up in the world as a human being. Seems really small, not as big as being President of the United States. But look, a good teacher, a person who is a good teacher, can have as great if not a greater impact on the world than the President of the United States. To me, that’s how change happens. It’s not glamorous and oftentimes, sadly, it’s unsatisfactory. Because you are not going to live to see the fruits of your labor sometimes. I think that’s our challenge with so much immediacy. We want gratification now. We want wins now. I think about all the older Black folks and people who fought for civil rights and for change who didn’t live to see Barack Obama become president, but it didn’t change the nature of their fight, the nature of their work.
Michelle Obama:
I hope we don’t fall into that feeling, if it’s not big and I can’t see it, then what’s the point? Because changes, that day by day slow grind, it’s the knitting that we do. The analogy why I chose to open up the book with the power of small and talk about my knitting is that that was something that became real clear to me over the chorus of the pandemic when the whole world shut down and there was no big that could happen. All we could do was to tend to our knitting, to get up every day, to try to stay safe, to feed our families, to hug our loved ones. For many, they didn’t even have the luxury of being able to do that. For us to feel like that at that moment, one of the most profound moments of in our lifetime, that the biggest thing we could do was to be small and to do what we could do, manage ourselves, our health, the people we were responsible for, our neighbors, our friends, that’s life.
Michelle Obama:
That’s the profound thing of it all to me, that it still all starts with what’s in here, that light inside of us, the thing we can control. We can’t control how people feel about us, how they see us, whether they’re mean to us. We can control the thoughts in our head, how our soul operates. We can control the families that we raise, the neighborhoods that we live in. The smaller, the better. That’s what we can control. Then that impacts the big, because if we’re all doing that small job, just imagine all the stuff we wouldn’t have to be bothered with. If we all just tended to our knitting, there’d be so much we wouldn’t have to worry about. At least that’s how I see it.
Glennon Doyle:
If we all just tended to our knitting. Michelle Obama. I just called you Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obama:
You did it.
Glennon Doyle:
I did it. During even the really dark times over the last decade, you have been a consistent light.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Even when we can’t see you, even when you’re not in our … your existence, who you are in the world, the way you walk through the world, the way that you wife, the way that you friend, the way that you lead, the way that you parent has been a consistent light to the point that when I got to the end of your book and you were talking about are we still going to go high, there was a part of me that thought maybe you were going to say we weren’t. I don’t know. I just truly didn’t know.
Michelle Obama:
The last page. Oh, there it is.
Glennon Doyle:
When you stayed steady, when you stayed the light that you are, I just cried. I just started crying and I don’t know what that is. It might be just that you have been one of the only constant, consistent things in the world for the last decade, so thank you. We will be in your corner forever and ever, amen. We love you. Thank you for this hour.
Michelle Obama:
Thank you for this platform. Thank you for the light all of you are putting out there. This is that small power. It’s conversation one at a time. You never know who’s listening. You never know who it’s going to touch, but the fact that all three of you are putting your souls out there every day taking that risk, I applaud you. That’s why I wanted to be here with you. Thank you for not disappointing in the depth and breadth of this conversation. Thank you guys so much.
Glennon Doyle:
If you knew that was our only goal, please don’t disappoint Michelle Obama. Thank you, we have done it, we can go now. Thank you so much.
Michelle Obama:
Love you guys.
Glennon Doyle:
Love you.
Abby Wambach:
Love you so much. Thanks for coming on.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
Wow!
Glennon Doyle:
Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo woo.
Michelle Obama:
You all are smooth.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my god.
Glennon Doyle:
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