“Hope is a choice,” Michelle Obama reminded us last week, at the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. “Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.”

I am so ready to choose hope. I am so tired of despair and dismay and disgust. If Michelle Obama is offering up hope, I’m all in.

Watching her speech, and her husband’s, felt like going home after a very long time away. It felt like feeling better after a miserable flu. It also felt like a happy dream, from which I knew I would be required to wake up and return to reality. But Michelle Obama gave me a parting gift, and she reminded me that I had to choose to accept it: hope. It’s a choice. And it’s not magic: we have to choose to do the work that our hope inspires.

Earlier in June, I heard a differently delivered but equally welcome message of hope from another eloquent woman. This one I got to receive in person.

“Not only are we going to win, we’re going to win BIG,” said Nancy Pelosi on a big-showers-with-big-sun-breaks Saturday afternoon at Fremont Studios in Seattle. Pelosi’s voice was firm. She waved her arms emphatically. This was not a guess, it was a declaration. Doubt was not allowed. “And the Senate is a real possibility,” she added. Everyone clapped.

Pelosi was talking about the upcoming 2026 mid-term elections, of course, and yes, she was telling all of us who had trekked to Fremont for the Cascade/PBS Ideas Festival exactly what we had hoped to hear. Pelosi is a grandmaster at reading a room. She knew how badly we all needed encouragement, and she was there to give it. She also knew that we knew she was not the kind of politician who makes stuff up. She knew that we knew she would not say what she said unless she really, really meant it. This may’ve been an Ideas Festival, but what she was telling us was not, in her mind, a mere idea. It was a reality.

Nancy Pelosi is 86 years old. This is her last term in Congress representing California’s 11th district, which includes most of San Francisco. I was so grateful to be in the room. I wanted to see her once in my lifetime, in person, and I got my wish. I wanted to see her because she represents not just her district but, in these dangerous times, democracy itself. In fact, the idea she was there to represent, at this festival of ideas, was the very concept of representation. “The job title and job description are identical. Representative,” she said. “The constitution is very clear about the House. It is a reflection of the American people. The founders planned it that way.”

“I consider myself a weaver at the loom,” she added, later in her hour on stage, which sped by. “Every thread—every representative in the House—is essential.”

Nancy Pelosi won her House seat in 1987, right around the time that another lively, no-nonsense woman named E. Jean Carroll was building her career as a journalist and advice columnist in New York.

Carroll’s column, “Ask E. Jean,” ran in Elle magazine for 26 years. She also had a cable TV show, also called Ask E. Jean, in which she strolled around the set, flopping down now and then on an overstuffed couch and then immediately springing up again, all while dispensing rapid-fire advice to callers. She wrote for Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Playboy. By the mid-1990s, E. Jean Carroll was more well-known in New York than Donald Trump.

That’s just a sampling of what I learned while watching Ivy Meeropol’s riveting documentary, Ask E. Jean, at our local cinema. Carroll’s lively personality keeps the film’s energy cranked up throughout. (It’s still in theaters; a streaming date has not yet been announced.)

Trump appears only briefly in Ask E. Jean. We see him in 2022, being shown a mid-90s photo of Carroll smiling at him (his back is to the camera) and his then-wife Ivanka. He claims not to recognize Carroll. Then he looks more closely and thinks it could be a photo of his second wife, Marla, which is interesting given that he had declared to the world that E. Jean was “not his type” and that is why he could not possibly have raped her.

After the mid-1990s assault in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, Carroll made the choice not to press charges. A friend advised her that Trump would fight her in court with battalions of lawyers. Carroll had a career she loved, and she did not want to destroy it. She reflects in the film that it was a different era—long before the me-too movement—and she is glad that times have changed, and that she is now a part of that change. Several times in the film, Carroll reiterates what she has said many times since she filed her first lawsuit against Trump in 2019: he lied about her, he tried to smear her, and therefore she had to defend herself.

Seeing Ask E. Jean two days after seeing Speaker Emerita Pelosi was bracing. Inspiring. Such courage. Such confidence. Such strong spines. Remember all those lawyers and tech bros that bowed down to Trump so early in this second term? Shame on them. Remember the old line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels? That’s Pelosi. That’s Carroll. And that’s Michelle Obama. Dancing circles around all those spineless men. No offense meant to Fred Astaire.