Michelle Obama is cementing her status as a true celebrity by participating in one of their most important pastimes: setting the record straight on a podcast. She did this a couple weeks ago, when she shot down divorce rumors on Sophia Bush’s podcast, but this time around, it was on her own show, IMO, where she explicitly addressed why she didn’t attend Donald Trump’s inauguration. Do you have any guesses? If your first thought was It seemed like it would be a bad time, then you’re basically right.
View this post on Instagram
The former First Lady told guest Taraji P. Henson that her decision to stay home from the inauguration was met with “ridicule and criticism” and, of course, more rumors about her marriage. “People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason that they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart,” Obama said. “It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was … perceived as right but do the thing that was right for me.”
So how does Michelle Obama stop herself from conceding to the perceived “right” thing to do? She becomes unprepared. “I had to basically trick myself out of it,” she told Henson, explaining that she always has an outfit on hand that could be suitable for any occasion. “It started with not having anything to wear. I was like, If I’m not going to do this thing, I’ve got to tell my team I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it’s so easy to just say, ‘Let me do the right thing.’”
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Obama went on to say that she’s practicing the “art of saying no.” “It’s a muscle that you have to build,” she said. “And I think we suffered, because it’s almost like we started training late in life to build that muscle, right? I am just now starting to build it.”
More power to her. Of all the occasions to skip, she picked a pretty good one. What was she supposed to do, put on a fake smile and pretend she enjoys chitchatting with Mark Zuckerberg? This woman has been through enough.
