Blooming in Birmingham

We’ve all heard the old adage “Bloom where you are planted.” Until recently this saying was nothing more than cliché to me.



After living and working in other cities for six years, I returned to my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in August of 2009. This return not only meant coming back to a city that I couldn’t wait to leave when I was a kid, but it also meant leaving my job as a features reporter and columnist at a popular weekly publication in Louisville, Ky.


I spent my first year in Birmingham wondering if I’d made a mistake. Would it be possible for me to achieve my writing aspirations in a city like Birmingham and while working a very demanding teaching job? Only time will tell, but when I turned 30 last month I realized how foolish I was being. I had spent a year drowning in doubt and not working toward anything! Of course I won’t accomplish my goals here in Birmingham if I have the attitude that I need to move elsewhere make my dreams come true.


Life has led me back to Birmingham and it’s time that I bloom where I’ve been planted.


I think Ralph Waldo Emerson, my favorite Transcendentalist writer, said it best in his essay Self-Reliance:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Envying friends living in Los Angeles and New York is foolish and counterproductive. Trying to be the black Carrie Bradshaw will simply kill the things that make me unique. It’s time to fall in love with my hometown and show the world that Birmingham really is a magic city.