Stories We Tell

By Alyssa Croston

The feeling of home is something that every person deserves. A place to completely be yourself and be comfortable in your own skin. That warm feeling of belonging somewhere.

Born in November 2003 in a St. Louis hospital, Taylore Higgins had the entire world ahead of her, literally. Eight weeks after she was born, a passport for newborn Taylore arrived in the mail, and shortly after, her and her mom were on a plane to Djibouti, Africa.

Taylore’s father is a United States diplomat, meaning much like a child of military parents, Taylore had to move around quite a bit in her lifetime. After spending the first two years of her life in Djibouti, her family traveled to Ghana and Nigeria, which is where she started school.

Taylore attended international schools for most of her life. She met kids from various other countries and learned to speak French as her very first language. Taylore describes Africa as the most beautiful place she’s lived in, as it was filled with beautiful cities, beautiful culture, and beautiful people. Over the course of her childhood and teenage years she kept moving to different African countries, ending up in Nairobi, Kenya, and Cape Town, South Africa for the summers.

Despite living in places that others can only dream of, Taylore reflected on how she felt disconnected from the rest of the world. She was living amongst rich cultures and having fulfilling experiences, but she was missing the foundations of growing up. Because Taylore was moving so much, she never experienced a long-lasting friendship, and she was learning about subjects such as injustice and inequality at a very young age. And although she tried with all her might, and of no fault of her own, Taylore became slightly outcasted by the end of high school.

When choosing a college to go to, she reminisced on how she was a relatively well-rounded individual based on her experiences, and how she is generally open-minded and knowledgeable of how the whole world works. With that in mind, she toured her top two choices with her family, starting with Spelman College in Atlanta. Although she loved it, when she stepped foot on the campus of North Carolina A&T State University, everything changed for Taylore.

Now, Taylore is a freshman political science student here at A&T. She has seen the world in all its glory and all its ugliness, and she chose to make a difference. While living in Kenya, she lived through an election that almost turned into an evacuation situation because of the dangerous political climate, and since then she has been witnessing the way the political world shapes the rest of the world, and she wants to be someone who can change that world for the better. A&T provided a space for her to do so.

Her whole life, Taylore had been living without a home. She was not afforded the luxury of stability and normalcy like most other children, and it left her with a growing sense of loss. However, when she came to A&T, her sense turned into one of fulfillment. She found a place where she could walk around and not worry, she found a program that empowered her to make a change in the world, and she found people that made her feel comfortable enough to be herself at all times. Taylore A&T to be her home, and will continue to be for years to come.