Most people have a place to call home, but it becomes a little bit harder when you have two. Going from an Ohio University student to now a professor on her own, Michelle Michael reflects on her journey, which included a multirole stop in Athens.
Michael moved from Sri Lanka to the U.S. 10 years ago to pursue her higher education.
“We had a great education system,” she said. “But I did not want to do it in Sri Lanka because, at the time, we were done with the civil war, but the system was so corrupt that nothing was done in the time frame they said.” Degrees that would have normally taken three years started lasting five years because the universities would just shut down and students would just have to wait for them to open back up again, she said. This made her decide to study in a different place.
Her first stop in the U.S. was Carrollton, Georgia, where where she completed her undergraduate degree in mass communications at the University of West Georgia. She was sponsored by three Rotary Clubs during her first year.
She got emotional on the plane, she said.
“I started romanticizing this notion of home because I was here and away from it, and then the reality when you actually do go back home, hits you hard,” Michael said.
When she first went home, she assumed nothing was going to be different. She had a set idea of home in her mind, but realized everything she knew had shifted. She thought that she could easily take a step back and re-adapt, but the gap she noticed wasn’t really being reconciled, she said.
In her time away from home she kept in touch with her family and friends through social media but “there’s only so much you can do virtually,” she said. She knew things had changed in her absence but seeing it in person was still shocking.
“So, you always look at your younger siblings in a certain way, so when I went home in my head I was like, ‘Oh I’m supposed to be the one taking care of her,’” she said. “But when I get there, she was like ‘oh, yeah don’t worry I’ll do this.’”
Although her core values are still intact, Michael said living in the U.S. has made her thinking evolve, which creates an even a bigger gap in relating to the people she knew before moving here.
Even her taste was affected: In Sri Lanka, Michael would put a little bit of salt on her food. She found salt in the U.S. bland and had to oversalt her food to make it palatable. Food makes her feel connected to her home, because it reminds her of where she grew up.
Michael moved to Athens in 2017 to complete a master’s degree in journalism at Ohio University. She had planned to study here while she was still an undergrad in Georgia. Because she was used to living in big cities, she didn’t particularly like Athens. She always believed it was too small for her liking. It didn’t dawn on her that she had started to consider it home until she moved away last year to start her job as an assistant professor of communication at Eastern Connecticut State University. She recalled living in Athens during the pandemic: She went from living with two roommates to being alone in a big apartment because they went home. Although the pandemic put space between her and her roommates physically, Michael said the experience them closer together.
“I also think that the pandemic kind of shows you who your good friends are,” she said.
Missing family is the hardest part of living away from where she grew up, she said. She lost her brother last January and it was the first time she had lost someone close to her.
“I’ve never had to grieve for a loss of life before, and I didn’t know how to grieve,” she said. With no family nearby for support and unable to go home, she found that her grief affected every aspect of her life.
Although her life remains split between multiple cultures, Michael plans to stay in the U.S. This is what she knows now, she said, and she doesn’t really know the place she grew up in; she knows a version of that place from 10 years ago, which is very different from how it is now.
When she talks about “home” to others, she always gets asked if she means Georgia, Ohio, Connecticut , or Sri Lanka — but to her, home refers to all those places interchangeably. Home isn’t a defined space for her; it is constantly changing.
“For me, home is a very fluid concept,” she said. “To me, home is never there nor here. It is just a feeling of who I am and that feeling that I am home, not necessarily a physical space.”
Sabine Obermöller is a journalism major at Ohio University. She completed this story for an assignment in a magazine feature writing course taught by Victoria LaPoe.
