Belonging by Michelle Miller

Author:Michelle Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Global Citizen

As I fought to stay emotionally afloat during my job search, it didn’t help that I was now completely alone in Bigmama’s house, where for weeks I did little more than wander the empty rooms and listlessly send out my resume reel to local stations.

After my return from college, I had noticed that Vondela was newly distant and brusque with me, but I couldn’t figure out what I had done. I suppose I could have simply asked her what was wrong, yet it somehow never occurred to me to do so. While I could tenaciously pursue the facts as a working reporter, at home I was different. For my entire life in that house, my most urgent questions had gone unanswered, and so I had learned to watch and listen for clues rather than confront hard family conversations in such a direct way. Besides, if I acted as if nothing had changed, I could console myself that I was being oversensitive or imagining things.

In my willful denial, I had been taken completely by surprise when Vondela announced she was moving out. She explained that she’d found a nursing position in Lynwood and had decided to rent a house closer to the job. Cheryl, she informed me, would be going with her. Baffled by her choice to pay rent somewhere when she could have continued living in Bigmama’s house rent free, and still oblivious to any transgression on my part, I had only hugged her and offered that she and Cheryl could come back to live at West 80th Street whenever they wanted.

One morning, tired of poring over job notices in the local papers and dreading the empty hours ahead, I decided to drop by the hospital to get breakfast with my dad. As we strolled to the first-floor cafeteria, I was bemoaning my lack of steady employment. That’s when Daddy surprised me.

“Look, Michelle, you’re going to be working for the rest of your life,” he told me. “So why don’t you use this interval to travel for a few months, see the world, think about what you really want to do.” He went on to suggest that I explore the countries of Europe and North Africa, as he himself had done right after college.

“You mean I should go alone?” I asked incredulously, imagining everything that might befall a young Black American woman backpacking solo across two continents. And yet I was immediately intrigued.

“Yes, alone,” Daddy encouraged me. “That’s what I did, and I can tell you, there’s no better way to find that place inside yourself where you’re most brave. I know you can do this, Michelle. You’ll grow so much. You’ll learn to trust yourself in ways you don’t right now. Go and find your life.”

I flashed on a memory of the ABC casting director telling me I was a mess, and realized that my father, too, had discerned the core of insecurity she had seen. But Daddy also fully believed in my ability to develop the strength of confidence that would bolster me through life, and I was quietly grateful for his faith.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.