Tag: inequality

For Young Women Who Have Considered Their Becoming

Much of our collective reflections on vocation in higher education focus effectively on the first category of discernment: What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to contribute to the world? That focus often rightly centers on career and community leadership and the many facets of one’s public life. How might we also develop vocational reflection on questions of personal import that encourages questions about who one is becoming in a world of structural inequalities and daily injustice?

Early in her memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama shares questions that she had asked herself in a journal she kept throughout her twenties. After working hard and dutifully climbing an educational and professional ladder through Princeton and into a leadership role at a highly regarded Chicago law firm, she realized: “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.”

Michelle Robinson as a student at Princeton University.
From the Obama-Robinson family archives (source).

At the same time, she was newly in love with a man whose personality became a powerful presence in her life:

I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine. … 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.

Enter the journaled reflections of a twenty-something Michelle Robinson:

One, I feel very confused about where I want my life to go. What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to contribute to the world? Two, I am getting very serious in my relationship with Barack and I feel that I need to get a better handle on myself.

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