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ime seemed to loop and leap, making it feel impossible to measure or track.
Each day was packed. Each week and month and year we spent in the White
House was packed. I’d get to Friday and need to work to remember how
Monday and Tuesday had gone. I’d sit down to dinner sometimes and wonder
where and how lunch had happened. Even now, I still find it hard to process.
The velocity was too great, the time for reflection too limited. A single afternoon
could hold a couple of official events, several meetings, and a photo shoot. I
might visit several states in a day, or speak to twelve thousand people, or have
four hundred kids over to do jumping jacks with me on the South Lawn, all
before putting on a fancy dress for an evening reception. I used my down days,
those free from official business, to tend to Sasha and Malia and their lives, before
going back “up” again—back into hair, makeup, and wardrobe. Back into the
vortex of the public eye.

As we moved toward Barack’s reelection year in 2012, I felt that I couldn’t
and shouldn’t rest. I was still earning my grace. I thought often of what I owed
and to whom. I carried a history with me, and it wasn’t that of presidents or First
Ladies. I’d never related to the story of John Quincy Adams the way I did to that
of Sojourner Truth, or been moved by Woodrow Wilson the way I was by
Harriet Tubman. The struggles of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King were more
familiar to me than those of Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower. I carried
their histories, along with those of my mother and grandmothers. None of these
women could ever have imagined a life like the one I now had, but they’d
trusted that their perseverance would yield something better, eventually, for
someone like me. I wanted to show up in the world in a way that honored who