Oprah Winfrey is Living Her Best Life

Oprah Winfrey recently sat down for an interview with Vogue Magazine. Here's what she had to say:

On fitness guru Bob Greene's help in naming her home:
“I was calling it Tara II, and one day Bob and I were walking around the property and he said, ‘Scarlett O’Hara wishes she had this. Scarlett was not living like this.’ So he goes, ‘You need a better name. The fact that you are an African-American woman from Mississippi and you get to have this . . . it’s deep.’ So I go, ‘Yeah! It’s like a dream.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah! It’s a promise! It’s the Promised Land!’ So I feel that every day. I don’t know of a person who can honestly, deeply, profoundly speak to the word contentment. I’ve tried to talk to other people about this thing: I have no angst. No . . . nothing. No regret, no fear. I mean . . . just absolute joyful contentment.”

On being fully present:
"(Photographer) Annie [Liebovitz] was saying, ‘I hope I’m not keeping you from (interviewer) Jonathan [Van Meter].’  I go, ‘I’m not worried about Jonathan. Because I can only concentrate on being here with you right now. And then when I’m with Jonathan, I will be with Jonathan and I won’t be thinking about you!’ She let out a big laugh and, as she was walking away, said, 'I have learned that being-fully-present thing. I am 1,000 percent fully present.' "

On being on the cover of Vogue:
“Dreamed to be in Vogue? I’m a black woman from Mississippi . . . I would never have even thought of it as a possibility . . . I’ve been fighting weight all my life, definitely never even thought of myself as an attractive girl. So why would I be dreaming about Vogue? Vogue is the big house! Didn’t think I’d be sittin’ at that table!”

On depression:
“I shall never forget Saturday morning, October 17 (the day after Beloved opened). I got a call from someone at the studio, and they said, ‘It’s over. You got beat by Chucky.’ And I said, ‘Who’s Chucky? What do you mean it’s over? It’s just Saturday morning!’ I knew nothing about box-office projections or weekend openings. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and I said to Art, 'I would like macaroni and cheese for breakfast.' And soooo began my long plunge into food and depression and suppressing all my feelings.

I actually started to think, Maybe I really am depressed. Because it’s more than ‘I feel bad about this.’ I felt like I was behind a veil. I felt like what many people had described over the years on my show, and I could never imagine it. What’s depression? Why don’t you just pick yourself up? That’s when the gratitude practice became really strong for me, because it’s hard to remain sad if you’re focused on what you have instead of what you don’t have.”

On what she learned from public failure:
“It taught me to never again—never again, ever—put all of your hopes, expectations, eggs in the basket of box office. Do the work as an offering, and then whatever happens, happens.” 

On what she knows now at 63 that she didn't know at 44 (when she made Beloved):
“In your 40s, you’re coming into it, you’re intellectualizing things, and you kind of know it and you feel it. But there is a deepening and a broadening and quickening of the knowing that happens in your 50s. Maya Angelou used to say to me, ‘The 50s are everything you’ve been meaning to be.’ You’d been meaning to be that person. By the time you hit 60, there are just no . . . damn . . . apologies. And certainly not at 63. And the weight thing that was always such a physical, spiritual, emotional burden for me—no apologies for that either.”

Read the full interview at Vogue.

This September, @Oprah will return to broadcast television for the first time since her talk show ended (there was a one-off interview with First Lady @MichelleObama last December on @CBS), joining @60Minutes as a special contributor. But the story of how @Oprah decided to return requires that we first go back to the election of @realdonaldtrump. Two weeks after he won the presidency, @oprahmagazine decided to gather a group of Trump and @hillaryclinton supporters—all women—for a roundtable discussion. Feelings were still so raw that some of the women didn’t even want to sit at the same table. “One said, ‘I’ve never been this close to a Trump supporter,’ ” says @Oprah. “I go: ‘Not that you know of, maybe.’ ” About an hour in, @Oprah could see their guards coming down. “By pressing the conversation in such a way that people could hear each other’s stories without them being politicized, I was able to get those women from different backgrounds to begin to actually hear and feel for each other. By the end of that two and a half hours, I could have gotten them to sing ‘Kumbaya’ for real if I wanted to.” She cracks up. “I really could’ve! OK—everybody hold hands!” Ironically enough, it was the moment when she realized that no one had filmed the discussion that a light switched on: Maybe, just maybe, this is exactly what America needs right now. Tap the link in our bio to read the full interview. Photographed by #AnnieLeibovitz, styled by @phyllis_posnick, Vogue, September 2017.

A post shared by Vogue (@voguemagazine) on Aug 14, 2017 at 8:18am PDT