Michelle Obama's The Light We Carry

I'm halfway through Michelle Obama's latest book "The Light We Carry" and wanted to write down some initial thoughts. (Part 2 will be up soon).

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't read it yet, you might not want to keep reading... I'm just jotting down some initial thoughts and musings.

As I was reading this book, I couldn't shake Michelle Obama's voice in my brain, with every word that I was reading. Maybe it's because I had also consumed all her television interviews and appearances in short YouTube clips - part of which motivated me to order the book in the first place - and I simply had her distinct voice ingrained into my brain!

Maybe she really writes like she speaks, or I, as the reader, am reading it as if she is speaking to me.

She begins the book about conquering her fears - it's quite confrontational for me, because I need to take time and digest these concepts of bravery. I'm not sure that I have lived it. I've been pretty meek in comparison. It's something I'm still chewing at the back of my mind in my day to day.

I’m mostly struck by the chapter on friends, and the analogy she gives about the “kitchen table” type of friends.

Like these are the friends that you welcome to your kitchen table and have those kinds of chats.

I personally have been reflecting recently about my friendships and thinking, “Maybe I haven’t been that great of a friend…”

It’s been hard to feel genuine connection. It’s been hard to find people that I truly trust, let alone feel a sense of comradery or deeper connection.

Oftentimes, it’s situations like this which make me wonder if I am neurodivergent, because I’m not connecting.

I kind of envy her descriptions about connecting with other Black Women. As an Asian immigrant to Australia, I feel that we are even less densely populated of a minority - or that least, that has been my experience in this small city of the Gold Coast, in Queensland, Australia.

Not only is the Asian population small here, but the Taiwanese population is even smaller.

I do have a handful of friends, childhood friends, that we all know each other because our parents connected when they first arrived to Australia. But it feels even less like friends but more like distant cousins.

We are not blood related - by closer degrees of connection - but we share the same Ancestry. Especially growing up in Australia, amongst predominantly Anglo-Saxon populations.

Michelle Obama discusses in her book about the children of black folk in America going to better schools, because the parents proactively try to move in to the better neighbourhoods - even if it is the tiniest apartment, or they have to live near a train station to get there. They are the “onlies” in the school - the only black kid in their class, their grades, etc.

I’ve had similar experiences as the “onlies” of Asian children - me and brother, to be exact - when we initially arrived in Australia.

Yes, the first school we ever attended, my older brother and I were the only Asian kids in the entire primary school. We may have been the only POC as well. I can’t recall exactly, and perhaps if you counted Italian Australians as POCs then we weren’t. But other than that? I don’t recall any other complexions.

That’s how white that primary school was. And yes, when I look back and think back about it, it was a very unique experience.

Moving on to the chapters about her relationship with Barack, I think it is sweet and overall, a very "normal" example of what healthy relationships should be.

Her sharing of experiences about raising her daughters - it's not as relatable for me, but it was pretty straightforward, it's like - this is what normal, decent human beings are like. This is how they raise their kids.

(I will finish off in another story, part 2, the rest of my reactions to this book!)