All eyes on Jennifer Miller

Fifteen years after senior Jennifer Miller began school at the University, she finally is about to graduate.

Miller said she started her education at the University in 1992 and was the first person in her family to attend college. Although she came in with a full scholarship, she said coming to school was a big adjustment.

"I'd never been away from home before," Miller said. "... I just wasn't very adventurous, and I was really shy, so shy that people would have to buy my stuff at the store for me. I didn't want to go to the cashier."

In addition to the typical roommate struggles of a freshman, Miller said struggling with a calculus class hindered her academic self-confidence.

"I had an instructor who didn't really teach," she said. "... And I did not do well in calculus. Partly because of that and because of my loss of self-confidence, having never gotten a D in anything before - [it] was a huge adjustment."

Miller said everything else went downhill after this initial setback.

"It was really a blow to my self-confidence, and I really didn't do as well the next semester," she said.

Miller said that soon after that she lost her scholarship and decided to go home and work for a semester, hoping that school would get better after her time off.

"I came back after the semester off and didn't do well then, either," she said. "I was dealing with a lot of issues, like I had come out [with being homosexual] to my mom. And I was having episodes where I'd be really, really happy, and I could not sleep at all for days then when I just didn't want to leave my room or my bed."

Miller said that for about a year and a half she remained enrolled at Truman but rarely attended class. Soon, Miller discovered she had been struggling with bipolar disorder, she said.

"I was on the verge of being kicked out, but I left on academic probation so I could get back in," she said.

Miller said she fared a lot better without school, mostly because she had less stress. For eight or nine years, she worked to pay off her student loans at home, she said. During this period, she said she also worked to completely come out to her family.

"I felt like I let [my mom] down," she said. "I felt like she was crying because she was disappointed. And she was crying because she felt like she disappointed me because I had been gay for so long, and I hadn't been able to tell her."

Miller said that once she and her mom began talking about her sexuality, they became even closer.

"She was great," she said. "She kind of convinced me that it was all right that I was however I was."

Miller said that in the '90s, being gay was slightly less socially acceptable than it is now. She said this concept was very confusing for her.

"When I was growing up, there were no gay people on television," she said. "... It was something you got beat up for or was wrong. I just thought I was the only gay person in Independence growing up."

Miller said her family was more than accepting of who she was but that she had more obstacles to overcome.

"I got a job," she said. "I excelled at that - everything was fine. But my brother and my sister have both graduated, and I'm the oldest, and I thought, 'I could do better.'"

Miller said she decided to take a trip before she came back to school. For a year, she followed the 2002 tour of the Indigo Girls, a lesbian band.

"Coming from Independence and coming here in the '90s, I kind of felt like if I weren't the only gay woman or lesbian, I'm at least the only normal one," she said.

The cross-country tour turned out to be a fantastic, eye-opening experience, she said.

"I did the first two or three shows, and I loved it," Miller said. "I loved being on the road. I slept in the back of my truck with a camp mat and a baseball bat, and it was fabulous."

Miller said she then bought tickets for the rest of the tour. However, she said her favorite part wasn't the music but getting to know the other diverse audience members.

"You have to talk to people unless you want to be completely alone the whole time," she said. "So I started introducing myself in the line."

Miller said this didn't only help her overcome her shyness, but it also gave her the means to accept her sexuality.

"I think part of my quietness was that I felt uncomfortable, like someone was going to find me out, and it was going to be a problem," she said. "Around all these women and these men and these families, however, you were fine."

Miller said that because of the limitless diversity of the people she met, she saw that it was all right to break social norms.

"It was like, 'Oh my gosh, I didn't know there is no normal,'" she said. "... I realized I could be anybody I wanted to be and that at least on the road, it was OK because I was never going to see these people again, or if I did, they were my friends."

After following the tour on and off for about a year, Miller said she lived in Los Angeles for a few months before moving home to Independence again, where she worked until she decided to go back to the University.

"I came back to Truman specifically because this was the place that beat me before," she said. "I failed, and so I had to come back to the site of that failure and not fail so I can get over it."

Looking back on her recent years at the University, Miller said she thinks she has accomplished a lot. In addition to improving her grades from before, Miller said she has become involved in women's and gender studies and recently published the women's submission magazine, Jane Says, with her rent money.

"I loved really talking to the women about their work and the place it came from and what inspired them to write it," she said. "I feel like, yeah, I put up my rent money for Jane Says, but I got so much out of it."