Top highlights from Becoming
Now I think its one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a childWhat do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and thats the end.
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If you dont get out there and define yourself, youll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
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For me, becoming isnt about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesnt end.
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Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?
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For every door thats been opened to me, Ive tried to open my door to others. And here is what I have to say, finally: Lets invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. Its not about being perfect. Its not about where you get yourself in the end. Theres power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And theres grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. Its vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.
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Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again.
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Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
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failure is a feeling long before its an actual result.
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Everyone on Earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
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It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something youd otherwise find beautifula purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kidsand it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.
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Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
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Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignitiesin the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small theyre barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.
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Now that Im an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when theyre being devalued, when adults arent invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. Its hardly their fault. They arent bad kids. Theyre just trying to survive bad circumstances.
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His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
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At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
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Even if we didn't know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
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Since childhood, Id believed it was important to speak out against bullies while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a bully, a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance. I wanted Americans to understand that words matterthat the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it. It was dignity I wanted to make an appeal forthe idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going back generations. 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.
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We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. Whats better for us? Barack called to the people gathered in the room. Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?
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Its remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you arent being listened to, why wouldnt you get louder? If youre written off as angry or emotional, doesnt that just cause more of the same?
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Hearing them, I realized that they werent at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
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The lesson being that in life you control what you can.
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Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
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Let's invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It's not about being perfect. It's not about where you get yourself in the end. There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there's grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone Id dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of like a unicornunusual to the point of seeming almost unreal. He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after Id fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the latest book reviews, the American League standings, and what the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why.
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Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. Its the ugliest kind of power.
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When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. ...It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didnt want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didnt wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.
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This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established paththe my-isnt-that-impressive pathand keep you there for a long time.
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Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result
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Because people often ask, Ill say it here directly: I have no intention of running for office, ever. Ive never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last ten years has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by the nastinessthe tribal segregation of red and blue, this idea that were supposed to choose one side and stick to it, unable to listen and compromise, or sometimes even to be civil. I do believe that at its best, politics can be a means for positive change, but this arena is just not for me.
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[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
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I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.
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a happy marriage can be a vexation, that its a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privatelyeven alone.
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I didn't want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn't wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.
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I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
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Grief and resilience live together.
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Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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I've been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people - world leaders, inventors, musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some (though not enough) of them are women. Some (though not enough) are black or of color. Some were born poor or have lives that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if they've had every advantage in the world. What I've learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collection of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. 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.
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The easiest way to disregard a womans voice is to package her as a scold.
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This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established paththe my-isnt-that-impressive pathand keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other peoples high regard can feel too costly.
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Hearing them, I realised that they weren't all at smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
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Its all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that theres more growing to be done.
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minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the timebut it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. Its why we stayed a long time and laughed as much as we could.
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What I knew from working in professional environmentsfrom recruiting new lawyers for Sidley & Austin to hiring staff at the White Houseis that sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.
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I wasnt going to let one persons opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.
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We all play a role in this democracy. We need to remember the power of every vote. I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force thats larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news storyand thats optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.
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So many of my friends judged potential mates from the outside in, focusing first on their looks and financial prospects. If it turned out the person they'd chosen wasn't a good communicator or was uncomfortable with being vulnerable, they seemed to think time or marriage vows would fix the problem. But Barack arrived in my life a wholly 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.
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I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
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Kids wake up each day believing in the goodness of things, in the magic of what might be. Theyre uncynical, believers at their core. We owe it to them to stay strong and keep working to create a more fair and humane world. For them, we need to remain both tough and hopeful, to acknowledge that theres more growing to be done.
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When they go low, we go high
michelle obama ,
Becoming
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This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path--the my-isn't-that-impressive path--and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people's high regard can feel too costly.
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Youve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
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Heres a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjectivecollected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
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I've learned that it's harder to hate up close.
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I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they werent at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
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Its a sensation Ive come to love as Ive traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what youre used to; it carries smells you cant quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.
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Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts ... good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don't hurt. They're not painful. That's not just with somebody you want to marry, but it's with the friends that you choose. It's with the people you surround yourselves with.
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Hamilton touched me because it reflected the kind of history I'd lived myself. It told a story about America that allowed the diversity in. I thought about this afterward: So many of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn't live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us that there's only one way to be American - that if our skin is dark or our hips are wide, if we don't experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from another country, then we don't belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently.
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I knew from my own life experience that when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.
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