complete (ly) @ntiinze - Tumblr Blog

Michelle Obama for Vogue (December 2016)

Most of us are now familiar with her story: born and raised in a blue-collar family on the South Side of Chicago, endured an hour-and-a-half commute to attend the city’s first magnet high school, worked several jobs and borrowed a lot of money to get herself through Princeton, then Harvard Law. But what I didn’t know was how tentative and insecure she was in the beginning. […] She recounts the story about being told that Princeton “was reaching too high. That the schools I was applying to were too … much for me.” You can still hear the disgust in her voice all these years later. “And then I got there and I looked around and thought: I’m just as smart as these people! What were they thinkin’? So there are a lot of people who will try to step on your confidence based on their assumptions about who they think you are.” A murmur of recognition ripples through the audience. “For all of you sitting here, with those doubts in your head—because those whispers of doubt, they stay with you for a very long time—ignore them. I still carry that with me today, as First Lady of the United States, because there are people who don’t think I should be doing that either.” [x]