Michelle Obama on Her First Year as First Lady

Michelle Obama at the So Others Might Eat soup kitchen yesterday

Did she touch the queen first? Should her arms be bare? Are her shorts too short? Are her sneakers too expensive? Is she putting on weight?

"It wasn't something that I was prepared for," she said last week as she looked back on her first year as first lady.

The challenge, then, has been to remain Michelle through it all, and not become "somebody else that is in a magazine."

To stay grounded yet reach high.

This is a first lady, after all, who wants to make a difference, who dares to speak even now about her legacy.

She has spent the past year giving the job of first lady a test run, settling her family into a new life in a new town, trying to avoid creating controversy for her already burdened husband and figuring out where to make her mark.

"Our goal was to do everything that was done before, so that we'd know what it was, and uphold those traditions, but try to tweak it," she told reporters last week. "And now that we've gone through a year, we can really think about really what works for this administration, what works for me as a first lady, what resonates with where America is today." Read more at MSNBC