We've known each other for a while now and what I love about him isn't just his sharp wit, it's his sensitivity. He's unafraid to show his tender side. And over the years we've bonded over the ups and downs of raising our kids. We built a deep and sincere connection and I am so grateful to call him a friend. Whenever we see each other, it's like we haven't missed a beat and we just dive right into the conversation. In this one, we dive into the writing process, vulnerability, mental health and how focusing on smaller tasks can help us keep bigger challenges in perspective. It's a fun one and an added bonus, David didn't even step on my dress this time. So it was you, David. I should have known.

David Letterman:

Yes. And the other part of it is I'm surprised, and perhaps I did leave a big stupid footprint on your dress.

Michelle Obama:

Yeah. And I'm sure that's going to be in the library. We should get that dress, put it in the presidential library and outline the footprint.

David Letterman:

Thank you.

Michelle Obama:

First of all, my mother is here tonight, my brother is here tonight, my nephews, all my family. We've got some Shields and Robinsons and Finays and oh, there's my crew, some Greys. My peeps are here. So y'all have heard these stories, so try to act interested. And if I get them wrong, it's my version, it's my book, so don't be all like, "That didn't happen that way."

David Letterman:

I read the book.

Michelle Obama:

Good.

David Letterman:

Yes.

Michelle Obama:

I was counting on that.

David Letterman:

It's exciting to read because if you spend a lot of screen time, you think, "Oh, maybe the mechanism has been fried." So your brain actually works differently reading it. So thank you very much for that. One of the many things that I was taken by was this book is quite a lot of work. Writing is a lot of work and it's thoughtful and it's also biographical with examples to illustrate the thoughtfulness. How do you do that?

Michelle Obama:

Oh, wow. That's a deep place to start. I work with a wonderful collaborator, Sarah, who worked with me on Becoming, so a lot of it is storytelling. So I get to lose myself in the storytelling and then we work backwards. But as I said, for this particular book, it came about in the time of quarantine, that period as was described in the opening segment where we were all stuck. For me, I was just spinning. So that's the state I was in as I was agonizing and thinking, how do you keep yourself from falling into a deep, dark depression in these times?

And I had to start thinking of the tools that I had that got me through. And I got a lot of questions from kids, from people writing letters over that time, "How do you pull yourself out of depression? How do you get through uncertainty? How do you deal with a level of vulnerability that many of us live with all the time, but so many more of us were experiencing?" And so this book was the result of me trying to answer that question for other people and trying to answer it for myself.

David Letterman:

It's remarkable. I like to think mostly about myself. But I wish I had that ability because I think I'm like most people, if the soup is cold, I start to whine. I'm that guy. And that's not the way humans are supposed to be, is it?

Michelle Obama:

That's not how you are either, David. But you like to say that.

David Letterman:

What is this, gazpacho? Yeah, I like that. And then I realized that the whole book is a toolbox. And at this point, I'm thrilled because I thought that maybe I was the only one who needed this kind of help. But I'm thinking, here's a woman who has faced this sort of life, a life like anybody, and has found ways to cope with it. Because when you're suffering something, you feel a bit alone. But oh my God, if you have these struggles, then I don't feel so much alone.

Michelle Obama:

Well, and that's the power of sharing those vulnerabilities. I mean, I have friends who've read the book and they're like, "Wow, you're so vulnerable. How can you put yourself out there?" But what I've learned over the years is that vulnerability, that's where your confidence lies. If you can own your story and own all of it, the beauty of it, the hard parts, if you can embrace it, because a lot of times we try to ignore the hard part because you look at people on stage like us and we never talk about the hard times, we never talk about our fears, we never talk about any of that.

So kids are walking around thinking, "Oh, if I want to be Michelle Obama, then it's got to be perfect. She must have grown up with a silver spoon." They don't remember all we went through in the White House. Many young kids today don't even remember how attacked I was because now I'm Michelle Obama. They don't remember when I was accused of not loving my country. So they can look at where I am now, but my dad's motto is that, nobody can make you feel bad if you feel good about yourself.

David Letterman:

Now, do you mind if we talk a bit about that, because that was one of those things underlined in my copy of the book. I'm not sure that would work. I used to have a television show and occasionally-

Michelle Obama:

You did?

David Letterman:

Yeah. Occasionally people would say and write unpleasant things about me. And when that would happen, I wouldn't leave the house and I would whine to my wife and I would whine to anybody about, "Well, leave me alone." Like that. That's how I would deal with it.

Michelle Obama:

That's how it would sound?

David Letterman:

Yeah, that's pretty much any day at my house.

Michelle Obama:

David's whining again.

David Letterman:

Yeah, David's whining again. But I found that it does hurt. And a lot of people say, "No, it doesn't bother me, it's just part of the game." But that is stratospheric. Now, does that rock the household when that happened?

Michelle Obama:

No. I mean, it hurts for sure. And I think there was a second when I was like, "Forget campaigning, I'm just not doing this." But then I had to think to myself, well then that would let them win. And what example am I showing if... I can take a lick because I grew up in a household with Marian and Fraser Robinson, where I was seen enough. Because here's the thing, it didn't just work all of a sudden. When you're a Black woman in America and you're not wealthy, you have to practice liking yourself a lot.

Because let me tell you, I grew up very early with people trying to set their bar low for me. And you see it coming. And this is the thing that we cannot pretend that kids don't see when they're being devalued. Because anytime it happened to me as early as kindergarten, I knew it. I knew in second grade that the second grade teacher thought we were all dumb and not worth it because she didn't organize the class, she wasn't giving us homework.

And I went home to my kitchen table and I complained about it, I was like, "Mom, this is not going to happen. This lady, she doesn't think we can read, she doesn't think we're smart." And I went home and I had a mother who believed in my voice, but I knew in second grade that that teacher didn't think the kids she was teaching were worthy. And I was looking for homework, all of us were. What happened was my mother went up to that school, and that's what mothers do, they go up to that school. And she was one of those mothers, she went up to that school. And before you knew it, I was out of the second grade and in the third grade.

So there were a handful of us who got tested, we were advanced. Not only were we smart, but we were smarter than smart and we got skipped to the third grade. But there were only three of us. And I thought, what happened to the rest of the kids in that second grade class that didn't have a mother who could advocate for them and didn't have kids who could test out? But I was used to that. The world has made me practice liking myself. And that is a tool for young people. You cannot wait for somebody to see you because first of all, there are people who don't even know you exist.

They don't even know your pain, they don't know your struggle. And this just isn't race, David, if you're poor, if you live outside in a rural county, if you are not in the best school system, if you are a woman, there are many ways to be othered in this world, and for some of us when it happens, it breaks us. For me, I just happened to be that smart kid that was like, "Oh, I will show you. You doubt me, I'll work harder." And so by the time I got to the White House and I was like, "Oh, you don't think I'm going to be the best First Lady that you have ever seen? I am going to work so hard, I'm going to launch so many initiatives, I'm going to be all over the world. You just wait." That part.

David Letterman:

Yeah. Yes.

Craig Robinson:

My sister was much more focused than I was.

Michelle Obama:

This is my big brother Craig. Yep, mom's favorite and my best friend growing up. He knows better than anyone that I've always been this way.

Craig Robinson:

And I would say that she really concentrated on getting every single answer right. And that's who she is right there, if I could give you an example. Where I was trying to get good grades, but I wasn't trying to get everything right. I was trying to be efficient with my time because I wanted to be off and do other things. Now, my sister wanted to do other things too, but it was really important for her to get every answer correct. We lived in a very small apartment. It was really a one bedroom apartment that we made into a two bedroom apartment and my sister and I shared a room and so there was not very much room to play. We played in the living room and that was pretty much it.

So there was a time where we're both in the living room playing and she's playing with her dolls and I'm playing with my soldiers and she just gets up and says, "I can't play in the same room as you, you're having too much fun." She was four and I was six. She said, "You're having too much fun." I'm over here, minding my own business and she was also upset from the fact that she must not have been having fun and I was. So I always had to manage that. And of course, I got up and moved out of the room and went into a different room rather than making her move. So we actually created the personality that she is in some ways, we emboldened it.

Michelle Obama:

That's one of the most beautiful parts of having a big brother. As much as I want to tell him he's wrong, as much as I want to claim my path as my own, I am who I am because of him, because he gets me, because he sees me. We've laughed and cried and fought and commiserated and everything in between. And so whenever I feel a little lost or untethered, there's a special comfort in knowing that Craig is only a text or phone call away. And whether you've got siblings or not, I hope you've got someone like him who can keep you grounded, because that kind of support might be the only way that you can take flight.

David Letterman:

So the pandemic begins and you started knitting?

Michelle Obama:

I did.

David Letterman:

Never done it before?

Michelle Obama:

No, I hadn't done it seriously because we were raised in that time where sewing and knitting and all that stuff, that was what your grandparents did. All my whole family, everybody in my family sewed as I grew up. So we were raised in that way, but we came from a culture, I think all working class families, particularly Black families, where everybody sewed clothes for other people to make a living. They were carpenters, they were fixers, menders, makers. So I came from that. But on that ascent to greatness, going to school, you lose track of that. And I certainly did. So it was interesting that in that time of stillness, that was a thing that I thought of, let me try to knit. It was just like that. So I ordered some knitting needles because I was spinning and I needed to quiet my mind.

So I taught myself how to knit. But I talk about knitting, I use that as a metaphor in the book, it's one of the first chapters, it's called The Power of Small. Because what happened to me in the course of knitting the task of, first of all, learning how to do something new, learning how to do something with my hands, which is something we get away from, working with our hands, making something. It was meditative for me in a time when I was depressed in quarantine. I was watching the news, I was looking at Trump, I was mad about the world, I was looking at the riots, and I had been asked to do the speech for the convention. And I was like, "I have nothing to offer anybody right now. I can't motivate anybody to do anything." I couldn't even think of what to write.

But it was interesting how the process of knitting quieted my mind. And for me, I didn't even realize, I wasn't doing this for any kind of spiritual reason, I was just trying to use up some time, but there was a quieting that happened. And then as I started thinking about it as I was writing in the book, the beauty of knitting is that it is one stitch at a time. You don't get anywhere without a knit and a pearl and a knit and a pearl and it's a row over a row. And there was some power in being able to control and make something, the thing in my lap I could control. And that's what I started thinking, it's like, that's wrong with me. I'm trying to go big, I'm trying to think of a big speech and I don't have that platform in quarantine, but I can focus on what's in my lap. Let me look at what I uniquely can control. The truth is what's in our lap.

The fact that, yes, there are riots going on, but there were people who were also coming out and marching. They saw brutality, but the country - remember - for a time, had come together around Black Lives Matter. There were all these emergency workers who were sacrificing themselves in this quarantine. People were giving, we were a better nation than we were being taught. But we lose sight of the beauty of what's small because we're taught that big is better. This is where great becomes the enemy of the good. And you don't have the power to change the world until you do the thing you actually can control, the thing in your lap. Let us now value the power of small. We want to change everything, but we don't want to vote when voting is the thing we uniquely control. So I use that as a metaphor because now when I'm feeling really down, I think about what's the thing in my lap? And that's the power that I have in the small thing that's in my lap and I think we all have that power.

David Letterman:

Did you knit those scarves?

Michelle Obama:

I did not. That was pre-knitting.

David Letterman:

What did you end up knitting and do you still knit?

Michelle Obama:

Yeah, I still do. Well, I had to stop when I was writing the book and doing the book tour because it's hard to write and knit at the same time. But yeah, I made sweaters, I made hats, one year, everybody I know got a blanket. I made baby sweaters for-

David Letterman:

How do you know when you're finished knitting something?

Michelle Obama:

When the outfit is done, David.

David Letterman:

Well, yeah, I get that-

Michelle Obama:

When the hat is done, you bind off.

David Letterman:

I know a little something about this. When I was a kid, I learned to knit at that age.

Michelle Obama:

Did you really?

David Letterman:

Yes.

Michelle Obama:

You are lying.

David Letterman:

I'm not lying.

Michelle Obama:

Really?

David Letterman:

Yes.

Michelle Obama:

Okay. So what did you knit?

David Letterman:

Well, that's why I asked how you know when it's done. What I love is exactly what you talked about, your mind narrows.

Michelle Obama:

Yes. It does. You focus.

David Letterman:

But I didn't know. And so, eventually, Labor Day came around and I had to go back to school, but in the meantime, the thing must have been eight feet long.

Michelle Obama:

So you were just knitting a straight rectangle?

David Letterman:

Well, no. It was more in the shape of a shovel. It was narrow-

Michelle Obama:

And then it widened.

David Letterman:

... and then it got big. And I'm sorry, I wasn't more productive.

Michelle Obama:

So you didn't learn how to even out your rows?

David Letterman:

No. Who cares? That's for losers.

Michelle Obama:

So you were-

David Letterman:

But I do know the therapeutic part of it, so that was my point.

Michelle Obama:

Absolutely.

David Letterman:

Yeah.

Michelle Obama:

Absolutely.

Marian Robinson:

My name is Marian Robinson and I am Michelle's mother. The one thing I wish children nowadays did not worry about was whether you were liked or not because it can get in your way. And I figured I might as well tell her early because you can get in the habit of not caring what some people said. You care about things that are going to improve your life and you care about what people say who are helping you, but you don't care about small things. Well, I always say, you walk down the street and the person says, "Oh, that red coat is beautiful." You take two steps and the next person says, "Why do you have that red coat on? It looks funny." Well, now there's two people that you run into in 10 minutes time, so what do you do? You wear the coat you want to wear and not care about either one of those people. And you need to do that for your whole life. Don't worry about being liked. When you get ready to be liked, come home, we like you.

Michelle Obama:

So that's one of the suggestions, especially in these times, is we feel overwhelmed because we are all feeling overwhelmed. There's power in getting a thing done, having a routine. Barack and I had to learn how to do this in the White House because when your motorcade is 20 cars long, when you can't even walk out the door to get fresh air without setting off alarms and having CAT teams come in. We, for eight years, had to be incredibly mindful of how we moved and we couldn't move far without a huge to do. So we had to learn how to stay sane in that environment. And so having a routine, getting up, exercising, I mean, it sounds trivial, but when I talk to young people who are struggling with depression, it's taking care of your body and doing small things like waking up at the same time every day.

We implemented those kinds of practices, I kept our family on a routine. We had dinner when we were isolated at the same time, the kids had class, we would take regular walks, we got back into a routine. And that doesn't sound big, but that's the power of small, that you slowly work your way out of some of those moods if you're not dealing with deep, dark, chemical depression. Some of it is just as small as getting up, taking a shower, not going days on end, doing the same thing over and over again.

Those small tools can be as powerful as the big change you think you need. And I resort to that a lot. I have to think of big initiatives, not in terms of the end product, but what do we get done today to end childhood obesity? What do I have control over as First Lady that I can uniquely do? Because if you look at a big problem, why start if you can't fix it all? But change is small, change is like knitting, it is a knit and a stitch at a time and we lose sight of that. And sometimes we give up because we can't do it all. But there is power in doing something every day towards a goal.

David Letterman:

Well, you're very kind. Having known you, you, my friend, are the way humans should be.

Michelle Obama:

Aw, thank you, David.

David Letterman:

Michelle Obama, ladies and gentlemen.

Michelle Obama:

David Letterman.

David Letterman:

Thank you.

Michelle Obama:

Thank you, Chicago. I love my town.

Michelle Obama:

So, it doesn't have to be knitting, it can be anything, drawing, painting, writing, fixing things, basket weaving, whatever you want it to be. Because let's face it, we live in a world where it is easy to feel overwhelmed. It's easy to feel like we don't matter. But creating, building, engaging, oh, those actions remind us of our power, our power to make change, our power to create something from nothing. And that's a fundamental truth that I always want young people to know that yes, there will be days you feel alone or you have no clue what happens next, but that's okay, it's good even. Because the experience of finding your way out of those moments, the ups and downs of figuring out who you truly are, oh, that's how you figure out where your power comes from and how you want to use it. Your future is totally and completely within your grasp, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed if you only focus on the scale of the mountain in front of you, whether that's a problem with your significant other or making new friends in a new city or combating inequality or discrimination or climate change. But if you break those things down, if you just keep working at it day by day, step by step, action by action, you'll see that you're making progress. And soon enough, you'll see that you're part way up that mountain and that the summit isn't far away. That's the power of small. If you unlock it, it's a way you can move mountains.

Speaker:

This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original, produced by Higher Ground and Little Everywhere. Executive produced by Dan Fierman and Mukta Mohan for Higher Ground and Jane Marie for Little Everywhere. Audible executive producers, Zola Mashariki and Nick D'Angelo. Audible co-producers, Keith Wooten and Glynn Pogue. Produced by Mike Richter with additional production by Joy Sanford, Dann Gallucci, Nancy Golombisky, and Lisa Pollak with production support from Andrew Eapen, Jenna Levin and Julia Murray. Location recording by Jody Elff. Special thanks to Melissa Winter, Jill Van Lokeren, Crystal Carson, Alex May-Sealey, Halle Ewing, Merone Hailemeskel, Sierra Tyler, Carl Ray Njeri Radway, Meredith Koop, Sara Corbett, Tyler Lechtenberg, and Asra Najam. The theme song is Unstoppable by Sia. The closing song is Lovely Day by Bill Withers. Audible Head of US content, Rachel Ghiazza. Head of Audible Studios, Zola Mashariki. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound Recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Voiceover by Novena Carmel. This episode was recorded live at the Chicago Theater in Chicago.