After Giving So Much to Everyone Else, Michelle Briggs Is Making Room for Herself

Michelle Briggs had packed her Equinox to the ceiling. She was leaving Arkansas for Texas, but some belongings remained in the corner of her apartment. With no room left in her vehicle, she expected to throw them away.

Then a woman from church called and offered to bring breakfast. When she arrived, she began helping Briggs clean. Seeing what was left in the corner, she asked what Briggs planned to do with it. Then she offered another solution. “I’m going to go home and get my truck, and I’m going to follow you to Texas.” She drove six hours.

For Briggs, the gesture was confirmation that God was involved in her decision to begin again. She was 45, divorced and moving to a city where she knew no one. She had accepted a job and arranged for an apartment she would not see inside until moving day. She wanted to discover who she was after years of giving herself to her family, her church and her work. “It wasn’t like I knew what I was doing and I had every step planned out. I did not.”

Today, Briggs is an author, inspirational speaker, transformation coach and founder of Journey to Heal LLC. Her work centers on women who feel unseen, unloved or abandoned. She wants to help them rediscover their identity and understand that their past does not have to define them.

Her own search began with a question she could not answer. After taking her youngest daughter to college in Virginia, Briggs returned to an empty apartment in Little Rock, Arkansas. She asked herself, “Michelle, what do you want to do?”

“Michelle was so lost,” she says. “She didn’t know what she wanted to do because she had given herself so much to the church, to her husband, to her children, to her job, to everybody else, that Michelle didn’t even know who she was.”

For much of her adult life, there had been a family to care for and responsibilities to manage. She had spent 20 years married and raised four children. After her divorce in 2011, she worked two jobs, seven days a week, determined to provide for the youngest daughter still living at home. With her daughter away at college, Briggs began considering what she wanted for her own life. But understanding herself also meant looking at experiences that began long before she became a wife or mother.

Born in Chicago, Briggs grew up primarily with her mother. Her father was not in the household. He later went to prison, and her parents divorced. In her memoir, Searching For A Father’s Love, she explores the feeling of abandonment she carried into adulthood and the ways she searched for that love in relationships with men, including her marriage.

When her parents remarried after 16 years of divorce, Briggs was 29. She had been married for eight years and already had four children. As her father became involved in their lives, she felt they were receiving something she had missed. “I even had a little bit of jealousy towards my children because I felt like they were getting from my father what I had never really received.”

Her marriage brought its own difficulties. Briggs describes repeated infidelity during her years as a wife. Her former husband, a pastor who has since died, eventually filed for divorce. She was left questioning herself. “I felt like I couldn’t keep my family together,” she says.

Briggs associated success with having a family that was doing well. When the marriage ended, she felt like a failure. At the same time, there were immediate needs to meet. Her youngest daughter was 16, and Briggs wanted her to feel loved and cared for regardless of whether her parents were together.

She poured herself into providing. She also went to therapy, where she began identifying things she needed to address in herself.

Looking back, Briggs wishes she had received more support during her marriage. Raised in the Pentecostal church, she recalls church mothers encouraging her to pray and fast when she was experiencing her husband’s infidelity. She prayed for him to change and questioned whether something was wrong with her.

“And if I only had something or someone I could’ve turned to tell me it’s okay to walk away, I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I did.” That experience informs the support she now wants to offer other women. She knows what it is to need someone to speak with about what is happening in your life.

For Briggs, moving became part of rediscovering herself. She wanted to leave Little Rock without going so far that her family would be out of reach. An online search for affordable cities introduced her to Temple, Texas. She had never heard of it.

During Labor Day weekend in 2015, she visited and had a realtor show her around. There was a Walmart and a small mall. She decided she could live there, returned to Arkansas and began applying for jobs.

When an interview brought her back to Temple, she decided to look for an apartment. At one complex, the woman at the front desk greeted her with words Briggs still remembers: “I’ve been waiting on you.” They had never met.

Briggs understood the encounter as confirmation that she was in the right place. A few days after returning home, she received the job offer. She gave two weeks’ notice at her current job and began downsizing. Some people questioned whether she could manage on her own. They told her she would be back. Briggs continued preparing, even though she did not have every step figured out.

On moving day, the woman from church helped her transport what would not fit in her vehicle. Later, when Briggs realized she would arrive too late to sign her lease, she called the apartment complex. The employee told her she lived on the property and would open the office when Briggs arrived so she could sign and collect her keys. Briggs saw God’s care in the help she received as she made the move.

Beginning again also required changes in how she responded to hurt and how she allowed others to treat her. She speaks about healing as a decision she makes daily, one that begins with acknowledging pain rather than telling everyone she is fine. It meant examining her own behavior, too. “One of the things I knew that I needed to work on, I used to be very retaliative.”

When someone hurt her, she wanted to hurt them back. Her faith challenged her to let God handle those situations. She also recognized that she needed boundaries. She describes having a giving heart and allowing people to take advantage of it, including in relationships. Learning to say no became part of that work. “You don’t have to overexplain it.”

In the workshops she now leads, Briggs asks women who they are. Often, they answer with the roles they fill: mother, wife, sister, daughter. “But those are roles. That’s not who you are.” She encourages them to consider their qualities and who they are beyond those responsibilities. It is a conversation connected to her own experience of having given so much to others that she struggled to identify what she wanted.

Her education reflects the persistence it sometimes takes to pursue a personal goal. Briggs spent 16 years earning her bachelor’s degree while balancing marriage and raising children. Later, she returned to school and earned a master’s degree, completing it despite delays during the pandemic. “And I always say slow progress is still progress.”

She has also learned to invest in herself. When her children were growing up, she bought for everyone else first and felt guilty spending money on herself. Now, she makes room for opportunities to learn, including books, coaching and gatherings with other women.

She points to a mastermind event in Atlanta as one example. Attendance was free, but getting there required paying for a flight and a hotel. She made the investment because she valued being around people who could help her grow.

Now approaching 57, Briggs is experiencing another transition. Menopause, changes in her body and reflections on the years ahead helped shape her book, Loving Me While Becoming. It includes questions, coaching prompts and practices for women who are rediscovering themselves and pursuing their God-given purpose.

She also had to reconsider the idea that her own healing needed to be complete before she could share her story. For years, she had talked about writing a book. Her godmother encouraged her to stop holding back what might help someone else. “And I felt like I needed to be healed before I could write the book, and that’s not true.”

Through her writing and her work with Journey to Heal LLC, Briggs wants women to know they can pursue their dreams, seek support and begin again. She moved to Texas at 45. She continued her education. She wrote the books she had spent years considering. And she remembers how alone she once felt.

“But I want to let people know that you’re not by yourself, and that you don’t have to go through things by yourself.”