The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times

Obama revisits how feeling different can become a psychological burden, noting that people may feel different for many reasons, such as their faith, ethnicity, sexuality, and more. She recalls how, growing up, her height made her feel self-conscious. She was significantly taller than other girls and felt bad about being placed at the back of line-ups or concert stages because of her height. While people admired her brother’s physical strength, and it helped him become an accomplished basketball player, Obama felt that her own strength was unwelcome. Inspired by Olympian Nadia Comaneci, 12-year-old Obama signed up for acrobatics at her local dance studio. When she noticed shorter girls acquiring the new skills more quickly than her, Obama found it “embarrassing” and “demoralizing” and, disappointed, soon quit. She shares that a lack of athletic female role models frustrated her; few women were then celebrated athletes, and Obama never saw a Black woman compete in athletics. She recalls “grasping for heroes” because it was “hard to dream about what is not visible” (95).

Throughout Obama’s adolescence, she remained self-conscious about her height and struggled to “fit in,” both literally (into typical girls’ clothes) and figuratively (in her high school environment). She argues that such self-consciousness can become a kind of “self-sabotage” because it prompts people to develop an overly critical self-talk and imagine how others must perceive them. Obama relates a story about a close friend who grew up as the only Black child in her neighborhood and endured racist behavior from a teacher, revealing that these memories of differentness remain a painful wound for that friend.

In contrast, Obama never felt out of place as a child because she grew up in a predominately Black part of Chicago. This changed when she went to Princeton as a 19-year-old and encountered a mostly white and male student population. While Obama didn’t have a “concept of entitlement” (102), she did notice that some students were much more at ease than she was and didn’t feel the need to prove themselves. Admittance to the school didn’t make her feel that she belonged there, and she “felt different and occasionally diminished” (102). Obama reflects on how alarming it felt to suddenly be a minority, a feeling that was exacerbated by peers and teachers who “seemed afraid” of her “alien” self (104). Obama coped with this new environment by befriending other Black students and bonding with a new mentor who was the director of the multicultural center on campus. By sharing their experiences, Obama and her new friends helped reassure each other that the bias they experienced was real, and she felt less isolated and lonely. Nevertheless, she struggled with being “hyper-aware” of her differences, and she warns that such prolonged self-consciousness can “take away your footing and what you know to be true about yourself” (106).

Obama recalls her father’s philosophy that others’ negativity can’t affect people with solid self-esteem. Her father made a decision to not allow the injustice he faced to define him or his self-worth, giving him a confident “ease from within” (107). Instead of dwelling on his own past, he encouraged his children to look to the future, emphasizing education, activism, curiosity, and ambition. Obama admits that it took years for her to live out her father’s philosophy and that she began by accepting aspects of herself that she couldn’t change and trying to take pride in those traits instead. Obama thus learned to focus on her own agency and tune out others’ negative behavior.