What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self

"You've got the guts to find your own purpose."


It's odd to think of a former secretary of state as someone who worries about fitting in, but for a long time Madeleine Albright did. In a group, she paid attention rather than interrupt. Sitting in her roomy office at the Albright Group, in Washington, D.C., Madeleine recalled her need to be liked and accepted with no regrets. "In the end I don't think it was a disadvantage. Wanting and needing to be liked is part of what got me to where I am."

Wearing a red suit and brown leather Lucchese cowboy boots when I met her, Madeleine, sixty-nine, seduced me with her forthright, unpretentious manner. She treated me as an equal, even though I've never owned cowboy boots or a cabinet title. Smaller than I expected, she held her body very still during our meeting. Her blue eyes seemed to swallow my words with a gravity that lingered even when she laughed. Don't forget this is a woman who has spent numberless hours with world leaders, including Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and grappled with genocide, war, U.S. embassy bombings, and U.S. cruise missile attacks on suspected terrorist camps in Afghanistan, among other crises.

Born Marie Jana Korbel in Prague, Madeleine and her family emigrated to the United States when she was a child. Apple-cheeked and round in high school, as she describes herself, Madeleine worked hard to seem casual and American. Her efforts were often undone by a serious streak that revealed itself through bossy outbursts, such as when she turned in a fellow student for talking during study hall. After attending Kent, a private girls' school in Denver, Madeleine went to Wellesley College on scholarship and married journalist Joe Albright three days after graduating.

Her letter is addressed to herself in the spring of 1982, at age forty-four, when she was still reeling from the breakdown of her marriage of twenty-three years. Shortly after Joe announced that he wanted a divorce, she accepted an offer to join the faculty at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. At that time in her life she had already earned a master of arts and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, acted as chief legislative assistant to Senator Edmund Muskie, and worked on the National Security Council's staff. In her new position, she was charged with creating a program that would encourage women to enter international relations, and she was expected to serve as a role model for those young women.

Dear Madeleine,

You will get through this fog and uncertainty--and you'll do it in the best possible way. You won't become cynical, stoical, or hard-bitten over the loss you're feeling. Over the next ten years you'll rebuild and reinvent yourself, finding success--and tremendous satisfaction.
The truth is, you've got the guts to find your own purpose and the integrity to fulfill it on your own terms. Your parents taught you to strive to achieve all you can, with the gifts that you have. Now you're about to direct those gifts toward finding your voice and using it to serve your country in ways that will surprise you.

When your students ask you how you have managed to be married and have children and work at the same time, you feel like a phony because you think you haven't succeeded at that. It's hard to feel qualified as a role model. But you are.

It will take years before you realize that you already are a good role model. But ultimately you'll inspire far more women than you'd ever predict. Twenty-three years from now when women say that they're choosing a career in international relations, the thing you'll enjoy most is telling them that there is no formula, that everybody must choose their own path.

With confidence,
Madeleine


Maya Angelou
Poet, Author, Playwright

"Don't let anybody raise you. You've been raised."


Born Marguerite Johnson, Dr. Maya Angelou was raised by her mother, Lady Vivian Baxter, a self-possessed, successful entrepreneur and businesswoman who owned a hotel and wore diamonds in her ears. Unmarried, Marguerite was pregnant when she finished high school in the summer of 1945. Her son was born in September and she decided to leave home two months later.

Leaving the comfort of her mother's big house, which had live-in help, was characteristic of Dr. Angelou's courage and fierce sense of independence. She has gone on to embrace--and excel at--a dizzying array of disciplines. She speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and West African Fanti. She has danced onstage, composed music, written plays, directed and acted in movies. In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked her to become the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in 1993, President-elect Bill Clinton requested that she write a poem for his inauguration.