Becoming

I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

I was ambitious, though I didn’t know exactly what I was shooting for. Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.

It was winter again in Chicago. I woke in the mornings to the sound of the neighbors chipping ice from their windshields on the street. The wind blew and the snow piled up. The sun stayed wan and weak. Through my office window on the forty-seventh floor at Sidley, I looked out at a tundra of gray ice on Lake Michigan and a gunmetal sky above. I wore my wool and hoped for a thaw. In the Midwest, as I’ve mentioned, winter is an exercise in waiting—for relief, for a bird to sing, for the first purple crocus to push up through the snow. You have no choice in the meantime but to pep-talk yourself through.

me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self.

Grief and resilience live together.

I felt sometimes like a swan on a lake, knowing that my job was in part to glide and appear serene, while underwater I never stopped pedaling

were me, as I’d once been. And I was them, as they could be.

Ultimately, though, like so many things, it was a matter of perception—how we decided to look at what was in front of us.

hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all.