Michelle Obama at the book-signing of ‘I Am Becoming’. Photo: Instagram/@michelleobama
In case you somehow missed it, Michelle Obama has launched her own podcast with Spotify, and it’s as refreshingly candid as her bestselling memoir Becoming.
While the former First Lady used the first episode to catch up with her husband, former President Barack Obama, about their relationship, the second installment of The Michelle Obama Podcast sees her chatting with her friend and journalist Michele Norris about the impact the pandemic has had on her mental health.
“I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression,” the mother of two reflects in the episode, which dropped on Wednesday. “Not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife, and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.”
Like the majority of us, she’s currently working on learning to be less self-critical. “I’ve gone through those emotional highs and lows that I think everybody feels, where you just don’t feel yourself… There has been a week or so where I had to surrender to that, and not be so hard on myself,” she continued, admitting to restless nights in which her worries kept her from sleeping.
Obama also gave some updates on how she and Barack have been passing the time with their daughters Malia, 22, and Sasha, 19, during the Covid-19 era. The former First Lady has been following a daily schedule as she did during the White House years – which includes the whole Obama family coming together to do some sort of activity at 5pm each day, from a “thousand-piece puzzle” to card game Spades.
True to gracious and optimistic form, Michelle also said that, in spite of her depression, she was using this time to reflect on what normal should look like moving forward, and emphasized that this was a chance to “decide how you want to show up in the new world – because it will be a new world”.
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Originally published on Vogue.co.uk
