My Inspirational Story

In April, I graduated from the Multicultural Leadership Program offered by the Bloomington-Normal Multicultural Leadership Institute in Illinois, USA. One assignment I completed as part of the program was to write my “Inspirational Story” and share it with the class. This was a hard assignment for me mostly because, as I writer, I had a hard time deciding which story to tell. I finally decided to focus on a theme and then choose elements that would support that theme. (That’s the English teacher in me kicking in!) What follows is the story I finally wrote and shared with my class back in February of 2023:

When I was a kid, my dad loved to take us on long road trips across the country. He had a thing for state capitols, and I have visited the state capitol building of almost every single state I have ever set foot in.

On one such trip, our family of six stopped at a rest area along the interstate and piled out of our old Buick LeSabre to head to the restrooms. A flattened cigarette pack in the parking lot caught my attention, and something told me to pick it up. I had no sooner done so than I heard that other voice in my head – the nagging one that most of us have that sounds like one or both of our parents – “What are you doing? Put that down, that’s disgusting. Why are you playing with trash?”

For me, that internal voice – the one that can take a lifetime to get out of our heads – sounds a lot like my mother. I immediately dropped the cigarette pack on the ground and kept walking only to hear my brother, who was a few steps behind me exclaim, “I found twenty dollars!” I turned to see what he was crowing over only to find that he had picked up the cigarette pack that I had discarded and found a twenty-dollar bill inside.

It wasn’t fair. I picked up the cigarette pack first. If I hadn’t, my brother probably would have never noticed it. We should split that twenty-dollar bill, shouldn’t we? But no, our mother said he found it, so he got to keep it. I beat myself up for the rest of that trip, thinking, “Why didn’t I look inside it before I threw it down?” I normally wasn’t one to pick up garbage off the ground, but something had told me to pick up that discarded cigarette pack. If I had ignored the nagging voice in my head and listened to my intuition, I might have been twenty dollars richer that day. Instead, I spent the rest of that trip watching my brother spend the money he found while I had no spending money at all.

I’m a writer and a storyteller, so when the time came for me to write my “inspirational story,” I had no problem thinking of things to write. The problem was narrowing my focus to a ten-minute presentation. I finally asked myself, “What is my story really about?” I realized that my story is, at its core, the story of what happens when you ignore your own inner voice and always do what that other voice thinks you’re supposed to do rather than what you are truly meant to do.

My mother’s greatest disappointment in life (aside from having three daughters and only one son when all she ever wanted was boys) is that none of her daughters did as good a job as she did when it came to finding husbands who would support them financially like our father has done for her.

I grew up poor in a very rural part of Effingham County, Illinois. My family didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was five years old. Where I grew up, women were expected to either pick a husband or pick a factory to work in. If you picked a bad husband, you might get to have both. People like us didn’t go to college or even work office jobs.

But from an early age, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. We didn’t have a lot back then, but what I did have was a father and a grandmother who believed in reading to the children in the family. A lot. There may not have been money for me to get an ice cream bar with my school lunch or new shoes more than once a year, but somehow there was always money for books when the scholastic book fair came around.

My grandma had a tiny room at the back of her house that was packed with decades of old issues of National Geographic magazine. I used to sit in that room for hours and pour through those magazines, dreaming of the day when I could travel the world myself and write stories about my travels.

Unfortunately, going to college after high school wasn’t an option for me. My father refused to provide his tax return information so I could apply for FAFSA and get financial aid for school. He said, “It’s none of their damned business how much money I make,” and that was that. I took a couple of night classes and paid for them with the money I was making working at a factory sewing gloves, but at that rate, it would take me decades to finish school. I worked a string of miserable dead-end jobs and tried to save up money to move out on my own, but I could never seem to make enough to get anywhere. Then one day, my dad said, “You’re about to turn twenty-one, so I guess you can start paying rent.”

Well– I wasn’t about to pay rent to continue living under my parents’ thumbs, so I decided to join the Air Force. My stagnant life was about to take off. For the first time since high school graduation, I finally thought I was going to go somewhere and do something important. I went to basic training in Texas and then trained for about six months to be an intelligence analyst. When the day came for us to receive our orders, I learned that I was going to be stationed in Hawaii for three years. I was beyond ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to go home and tell everyone about everything I had done while I was away and the plans I had for the next three years of my life.

But when I went home on leave for a month after completing my technical training, I found that no one was excited for me. No one wanted to hear my stories or cared about what I planned to do next. Instead, I got comments like, “I don’t know why you would want to live anywhere but here,” and “Yeah, yeah, so when are you going to get married?” As if the only reason I could have possibly had for joining the military was to find a husband.

So, what did I do? Instead of forging ahead with my own plans, I went to Hawaii and married the first guy I met after I stepped off the plane. I gave birth to my first son within the year and ended up separating from the military before I was even in long enough to qualify to receive my GI Bill benefits. And that’s how I ended up spending the next ten years of my life married to a violent abuser. I stayed in the marriage because I had been conditioned to stick with it. Instead of doing what I was meant to do in life, I worked very hard to do what I knew everyone else thought I was supposed to do. I worked hard to make my marriage work, to keep from raising my children in a so-called “broken home.” I lived in abject misery, and I sometimes contemplating suicide to escape. But I couldn’t leave my children alone with the monster that was their father so, against my better judgement, I persevered.

Even though my personal life was absolute chaos, I was finally able to go to college once I no longer had to rely on my dad’s tax return to apply for the FAFSA. I worked full-time at Marquette University and was able to take a couple of classes a semester for free there while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in an accelerated evening program at another school. But while I was achieving my dream of going to college, I still wasn’t doing what I was meant to do. I earned first a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in business because that was supposedly the practical thing to do. But the high-paying job I had been assured would be waiting for me after I finished grad school never materialized. I was beating my head against a brick wall trying to make it in a career I was never meant to be in.

My husband and I were drowning in debt due to his plethora of bad habits from drugs and alcohol to expensive clothing and shoes. While he went out on the town several nights a week dressed to impress, I was digging between the seats of his car for change to buy milk for our children. I was agonizing over my looming student loan debt, knowing that it was going to destroy our carefully constructed house of credit cards. That’s when I learned about a master’s degree program that would teach me to write a novel. It was the exact kind of program that I should have been pursuing through all those years I had wasted in business school.

Knowing that the only way to hold my student loan payments at bay was to go back to school and keep them in forbearance, I took the plunge and applied to the creative writing program at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee, WI. I stepped off the path of “supposed to do” and onto the path of “meant to do,” and my whole life suddenly shifted with me. Less than a month into my first semester of the program, it came to light that my husband had a girlfriend. Within the year, I was divorced and writing for a living. As a freelancer, I wrote press releases, how-to articles, and a couple of travel articles that ended up on the USAToday travel website.  Then I was offered a position as lead copywriter for an ecommerce store owned and operated by an alumna of my university. And I did all of this before I even graduated from the creative writing program!

My life began to bloom as soon as I stopped listening to that nagging voice in my head telling me what I should be doing and began to follow my true path, the one that I was meant to be on all along. Opportunities suddenly seemed to sprout from the ground beneath my feet, and they were mine to pluck as I saw fit. I have since published five novels and am working on my sixth. I am doing so many things in my life that I would have never thought possible while I was on the path of “supposed to.” I am a writer, a teacher, an elected official, and a mentor, and there is so much more that I still plan to do.

It has taken many years, but I have discovered my own voice, and its mantra is, “I do what I want.”

Thanks for reading, ya’ll! If you’re interested in seeing what else I’ve been up to, be sure to get your copy of my latest novel, One Bad Cat! And then check out my new nonfiction book/website project.