a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately — even alone. - Michelle Obama

Read books by people whose perspective is different from yours, listen to voices you haven’t heard before, look for narratives that are new to you. In them and with them, you might end up finding more room for yourself.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault.

Everything was not lost. This was the message we needed to carry forward. It’s what I truly believed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our reality — the world as it is. We needed now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction of progress.