This little flowered book has now survived a couple of decades and multiple
moves. It sat on a shelf in my dressing room at the White House for eight years,
until very recently, when I pulled it out from a box in my new home to try to
reacquaint myself with who I’d been as a young lawyer. I read those lines today
and see exactly what I was trying to tell myself—what a no-nonsense female
mentor might have said to me directly. Really, it was simple: The first thing was
that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it,
even if I was plenty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how
hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my
need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
The second was that I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose
forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine. I saw it
coming already, like a barreling wave with a mighty undertow. I wasn’t going to
get out of its path—I was too committed to Barack by then, too in love—but I
did need to quickly anchor myself on two feet.
This meant finding a new profession, and what shook me most was that I
had no concrete ideas about what I wanted to do. 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. As a young person, I’d explored
exactly nothing. Barack’s maturity, I realized, came in part from the years he’d
logged as a community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling
year he’d spent as a researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm
immediately after college. He’d tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of
people, and learned his own priorities along the way. I, meanwhile, 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.
In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of
those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had
awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I
couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed
Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly
questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal,
“would I be doing it on my own?”
I mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I
be a teacher? A college administrator? Could I run some sort of after-school
program, a professionalized version of what I’d done for Czerny at Princeton? I