I’ll be at Eat My Words Books in Minneapolis next Wednesday, April 17. I’m so excited to be in conversation with my editor, mentor and friend Kate Hopper about my memoir, “Girl in the Spotlight”. The event starts at 7pm.
Nothing can prepare you for how it feels to walk your old college campus decades later, the memories that rush in.
Last weekend, Shawn and I toured our Alma mater, the University of South Carolina, with our son Dillon. It’s where Shawn and I met and fell in love, and now Dillon has decided to go there in the fall.
What a wild and full-circle experience it was!
I kept trying to place myself: is this the path I walked to class? Is this corner where Shawn and I would stop to talk? We showed Dillon our dorms. We exhausted him with our stories. Dillon was so patient with us, even if he was simply tolerating us
.
This was Dillon’s decision, and it’s his experience now, not ours. But it meant so much to share that moment in time with him.
In “Girl in the Spotlight”, I write about how, during my own college orientation, I made a quick decision to change my major. At the end of my freshman year, I transferred to the University of South Carolina. I always felt at home there. Changing schools and committing to a career in broadcast journalism felt energizing and right.
Returning to the campus with my husband and son decades later got me thinking about how, even back then, I’d occasionally get little hints—I felt it in my body—that something about my chosen career path was off.
Looking back now, I'm not sure what else I would've done. I’d matched my skills and interests with a paying job, a career. It all made sense. There were no blaring sirens, not then, not yet, that it was time to get off that path.
I think back to that one writing class I took; it cracked open a window. It was as if my life foreshadowed itself.
Perhaps my inner knowing wasn’t telling me that I was on the wrong path. It was simply signaling that I wouldn’t be on that path forever. And of course, if I’d not taken that path, I wouldn’t be touring that same college campus decades later with my husband and son.
Scenes and chapters and endings and beginnings. This is the story of our lives, and it’s a truth we don’t realize until we live it.
These inner signals—that’s the part of ourselves that we need to make friends with. Notice them. Acknowledge them. Get curious about them. Definitely do not dismiss them. But don’t overthink them.
Keep going. Keep living. As our identities shift again and again, these inner signals point the way.
I’m Angie Mizzell, the author of the coming-of-age memoir “Girl in the Spotlight”. Thank you for reading my weekly newsletter “Hello Friday”. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi Angie, Is it too late to get a signed copy of your book?
I relish the days working with the youth. I am thankful to our God for those opportunities.
Dick O'Brien
Paper Back would be fine. How can I pay?
Thanks