Chicago: In "The Light We Carry", the follow-up to her bestseller "Becoming", the former US first lady reveals her "fearful mind" and experience of depression during the pandemic.
Michelle Obama “hates” how she looks, “all the time and no matter what”, she has revealed in her new book, the Guardian reported."The Light We Carry", the former First Lady’s second memoir, builds on her 2018 title "Becoming", and aims to be a “toolkit to live boldly”.
In the new book, which was extracted in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, Obama discusses ways to overcome one’s “fearful mind”, which she likens to “a life partner you didn’t choose”.
“I’ve lived with my fearful mind for 58 years now,” she writes. “She makes me uneasy. She likes to see me weak.”
This part of her mind is constantly having negative thoughts about her appearance, Obama writes. There are “plenty of mornings” when she turns on the bathroom light, takes one look at herself in the mirror, and “desperately want(s) to flip it off again”.
Her appearance, and her height in particular (she is 5’11”) is something Obama has always been insecure about, she explains in the book. Always “bringing up the rear” at school “created a small wound in me, the tiniest kernel of self-loathing that would keep me from embracing my strengths”.
Obama also admits to experiencing a “low-grade form” of depression during the coronavirus pandemic. “I kept with the work I’d been doing – speaking at virtual voter registration drives, supporting good causes, acknowledging people’s pain – but privately I was finding it harder to access my own hope or to feel like I could make an actual difference,” she writes.
When she was approached by the Democrats to speak at the party’s national convention in 2020, she put off responding – although she eventually agreed, calling Donald Trump the “wrong president” in her speech.
Any time she thought about the offer to speak at the convention, she felt “stalled out”, she has now disclosed in "The Light We Carry". She describes being “caught up in frustration and grief for what, as a country, we’d already lost”.(UNI)
