Book Review: A conscious exercise in 'becoming'

Michelle Obama's memoir elegantly demonstrates that understanding 'who we are' allows us to choose our goals, act with intention, and weave our values into the world.

Recently, I spent some time reading and reflecting on Michelle Obama’s memoir. ‘Becoming’ is such a great title for an autobiography – both acknowledging the journey toward the present moment and excitedly pregnant with possibility for the future. It really made me think about what ‘becoming’ means, and how each of us form a narrative just by consciously living out our lives.

Early on, Obama articulates the “universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.” This is explicitly a conscious exercise in choosing your path through life, by acknowledging where you started and planning your journey from there. This journey, this universal challenge, is first identified in the book in the context of a child’s growing self-awareness of how she is perceived by others on the playground. Obama wisely realized, quite early in life, that her life would be shaped not only by her own interests and goals, but also by whether she was trusted and understood by others.

This is a challenge faced by every individual, one that forces us to confront the various biases that each of us holds. Biases are formed by the past – by what we have learned firsthand and what we have been taught by others – and they inform all of our interactions. To be successful in life, we have to navigate each others’ assumptions effectively – sometimes fitting them comfortably, sometimes breaking them in imaginative ways. We cannot just exist purely as ourselves, as much as we would like to – we have to exist within an accurate understanding of the world and with an accurate understanding of others’ beliefs. And developing that skill is part of becoming.

We cannot just exist purely as ourselves, as much as we would like to – we have to exist within an accurate understanding of the world and with an accurate understanding of others’ beliefs.

The book is separated into three main sections: ‘Becoming Me’, ‘Becoming Us’, and ‘Becoming More’. This is a great structure. It makes sense that ‘Becoming’ can be pushed in each of these directions. And it makes sense that it takes a lifetime to push in all these directions!

'Becoming Me'

For every human being, ‘becoming me’ is a long, challenging process. This idea reminds me of a talk I attended last year by Dr. Mellody Hayes, a physician who helps patients deal with trauma. Her practice involves building ‘narrative competence’ – guiding people from being ‘actors’ in the world to developing ‘agency’, and eventually becoming ‘authors’ of their own stories. That seems to me the very process of ‘becoming’.

Acting is living within the constraints of your environment, and taking the best path forward that allows you to survive under those circumstances. Obama describes her initial career trajectory in these terms: “Somehow, in all my years of schooling, I hadn’t managed to think through my own passions and how they might match up with work I found meaningful…. I had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law.”

But then, reflecting on those early life choices, Obama chooses to exert agency – she chooses to swerve onto a new path. And it takes conscious effort. She asks herself: “What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to contribute to the world?” She stews on these deep questions for a while, then decides to quit her job at a fancy law firm to throw her time and energy into public service.

This decision, and the joy it brings her, prepares Obama to author her future – to consciously choose her path in life and her legacy as a first lady. Making conscious choices is a practice, one that allows us to direct the trajectory of our own lives. Yet making conscious choices is not easy. It requires confidence, some amount of luck, and the loving support of family and friends. But one of the greatest choices we can make is to author a future in which the next generation has that self-confidence, those lucky opportunities, and loving, supportive, healthy families. For Obama, ‘becoming me’ was about discovering that she was not just acting in the world, not just exerting agency in the world, but also authoring the future of the world.

Making conscious choices is a practice, one that allows us to direct the trajectory of our own lives.

'Becoming Us'

The process of ‘becoming us’ is complicated too. And there is so much love baked into this process, whether ‘us’ is a union between two people or a union of an entire nation. In fact, Michelle Obama’s love for Barack Obama seems completely in keeping with her love of America. Both of her lifetime loves are complicated but confident of themselves, sustained by an unwavering faith – among other things, that being complicated can be an asset rather than a liability. In the book, Obama’s first description of her husband is “an Ivy League-educated black Hawaiian raised by white middle-class Kansans” and those words reference the idea that he, as our president, represented all of us. There’s so much knowledge baked into that description, such a broad swath of the American experience accessible to someone who embraces these multitudes of identity. ‘Becoming Us’ is about realizing that being complicated is wonderful – every specific detail adds to the whole, every life experience adds to the great narrative of our nation, and each of us weaves a thread into the tapestry of humanity itself. And once we have become ‘us’, we can decide what more we want to become – we can then decide how we will author our future together.

'Becoming More'

‘Becoming More’ is about living consciously, about choosing how we author the future together. The story of Barack Obama’s journey from a community organizer to President of the United States is one we are all familiar with. But it is worth thinking back to why that message of hope and change resonated so soundly with people. Obama writes: “He was there to convince [America] that our stories connected us to one another, and through those connections, it was possible to harness discontent and convert it to something useful.” Obama noted that, as a community organizer, her husband “contended most often with a deep weariness in people – especially black people – a cynicism bred from a thousand small disappointments over time.” She added: “I understood it. I’d seen it in my own neighborhood, in my own family. A bitterness, a lapse in faith. It lived in both of my grandfathers, spawned by every goal [that had been thwarted] and every compromise they’d had to make.” Her love for her future husband grew as her faith and hope were refreshed by his words: “Listening to Barack, I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.” The first time she saw Barack Obama speak, in the basement of a church on the south side of Chicago, she was inspired by his words: “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

And that is what consciousness is about. It is about understanding the world, realizing that you are capable of not just action but agency, then choosing your actions deliberately – to move the world from the way it is now to the way you believe it should be.

And that is what consciousness is about. It is about understanding the world, realizing that you are capable of not just action but agency, then choosing your actions deliberately – to move the world from the way it is now to the way you believe it should be. That means exercising your mind to accurately perceive the world, stretching your cognitive abilities to imagine a different way of doing things, and then using your free will to change the world around you, with the faith that it is truly possible. Life is about becoming. It is the “universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.”

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Becoming is the memoir of former first lady of the United States Michelle Obama, published in 2018 by Viking Press. Described by the author as a deeply personal experience, the book talks about her roots and how she found her voice, as well as her time in the White House, her public health campaign, and her role as a mother.