Finding Hope in 2023

My theme for editorials in 2022 was “finding hope” as the world dealt with the mental health sequelae of COVID-19, disastrous sequelae of climate change, and hordes of refugees fleeing war and famine in their countries. In some editorials, I drew from inspirational books, such as Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope (Goodall, 2021). As I survey the troubled world in early 2023, I continue to seek sources of hope. Psychiatric-mental health clinicians must serve as catalysts for hope in those who have lost it, and we cannot perform this vital function unless we ourselves can summon hope and convey it to others.

Today I draw from Michelle Obama’s newly released The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (2022). I have been an admirer of this strong and beautiful woman ever since she came on the world stage as the wife of politician Barack Obama, who served two terms as president of the United States. From her earlier book Becoming (Obama, 2018), I knew some of the facts about her early life, nurtured in a solid home in the South Side of Chicago, yet ill-prepared for the egregious and hurtful racism she experienced during her husband’s political campaigns and his service in the Senate and Presidency. But the new book is uniquely personal, revealing much more about the perceived inadequacies and fears that lie behind her poised public façade. She points out, “Our hurts become our fears. Our fears become our limits” (Obama, 2022, p. 65).

This book is about overcoming fears and sharing the unique light that each of us has within. Obama generously shares what she has learned through life experiences and from wise teachers, such as Toni Morrison and her own mother. Like Jane Goodall, she derives hope for the future from her interactions with children and youth. She also elaborates upon her famous slogan, “When they go low, I go high,” a practice that all of us can emulate when experiencing unwarranted demeaning attacks. Our immediate response to vitriol is to give it right back. If Obama had lashed out in anger when she was labeled an angry black woman, however, she would have simply exemplified the stereotype. Instead, she did the hard work of crafting a different and more effective response. She recommends taking the upsetting feeling and “working to convert it into some sort of actionable plan, to move through the raw stuff and in the direction of a larger solution…Going high is a commitment, and not a particularly glamorous one, to keep moving forward” (Obama, 2022, pp. 276, 297).

I personally benefited from reading Obama’s book. I also believe this is a book that can be recommended to our psychiatric-mental health clients because it speaks directly to worries that they don’t matter, don’t belong, don’t have “enough.” If a world-famous woman such as Michelle Obama can admit that she still feels “paralyzed by not-enoughness” (p. 57), then all of us can admit that we too feel that way. And we don’t have to remain paralyzed!