Post-It Dreams

It was 2008 when everything changed. Rather, it was 2008 when I started to change everything.

By any stretch of the imagination, I had failed to fulfill my potential. That is how my mother put it, often. I just never seemed able to get it right. I knew the right things to do — go to school, get a job, get married, buy a house — but I struggled with the right sequence, the right type, the right timing. I bought the house at the wrong time after attending the wrong school at the right time and marrying the right man for another kind of woman.

I always got reading and writing right. For half a year in 2008, I went to a Books-A-Million store in Charlotte, NC every day and set about reading and writing my life into rightness. I would order a cup of tea, extra hot so it stayed warm for the duration of my ritual. Next, I closed my eyes in the periodical section and randomly chose 15 or so magazines. I spread them out on a coffee shop table with my notebook. For hours, I read about transmissions, Art Deco, French revival country homes, vegan make-up, transcendental shamanism, fashion weeks, deficit spending, Chinese politics, socialism, democracy, and Brad Pitt. I read it all, taking notes of new words and new ideas and connections between what I knew and what I did not yet know.

That is where I saw the ad for online school, Ashford University, in the back of a woman’s magazine. Staring at that ad, I began to wonder how it was like the online school where I worked. A Newsweek article about the coming internet disruption of U.S. higher…