The only thing I loved about Wyoming and Sheridan High School was the business class I took my senior year. Everything else about my life, I hated.
One year earlier, the summer before my junior year, I had moved with my dad back to my birthstate in protest, pissed off to be leaving Oklahoma and my friends. And golf that I would not be playing like I did in Enid. It felt like someone had yanked the chessboard out from under my life, sending every piece flying—and now I was losing at the game of life.
In Enid, golf was the spine of my days. I knew every fairway and green at University Lake and Meadowlake golf courses like second and third homes. My friend Josh and I talked more through golf than we did with words: the easy silence walking down a fairway, the quick grin after a clean hit, the groans when somebody putted past the cup by a mile. It was a language I understood.
Then suddenly, Wyoming. Mountains instead of flatlands. Pine trees instead of grain elevators. My clubs stayed in the corner. Every time I saw them, I felt a little jolt of homesickness.
I knew the friends I’d left behind kept on living the life I wanted to be in. They had pizza nights at Mazzio’s and after-school golf practice. Inside jokes shared without me. They were still “we,” and I was now “he”—the guy who used to be around.
So when we moved, I arrived with my arms folded across my chest, carrying teenage-sized resentment. I wasn’t just mad about the move. I was mad about everything it stole. And there wasn’t a single person in Wyoming who knew how much that mattered.
The town of Story, with a population of around 600, where we now lived with my grandparents, was supposed to feel like home, but it never did. Home is meant to pull you in; 37 Mountain Home Road kept me at arm’s length. Their place had all the ingredients of something magical—that fresh pine scent, picturesque mountain tops, air so pure it made your lungs tingle and your thoughts feel sharper. But inside my grandparents’ beautiful cabin, the air was different.
My grandma and I were cross with each other almost every minute of every day. Not the soft, thoughtful woman I remembered from childhood, she had stiffened into someone sharper by the time I reached my teens. Somewhere along the way, life had sanded down her warmth and left the edges exposed. She found every imaginable way to criticize me—my skinny frame, my posture, the way I chewed my food, the number of times I opened the refrigerator.
We moved around each other like two quarreling cats sharing the family room—watchful, irritated, convinced the other one was the problem. It wasn’t a war, exactly; wars have truces. It was more like a slow, daily weather system of her disapproval rolling through the house. What she said hurt. Like tiny barbs hooking into me and stinging, each one telling me I wasn’t good enough. That I didn’t do enough of the right things.
Every morning, I’d board the school bus in the half-light, joining a crowd of kids who all seemed to know one another since birth. The ride was thirteen miles into Sheridan, but felt closer to an hour, long enough for the sun to rise, long enough to remind me I was the outsider. I’m sure it didn’t help that I wore my hair high and tight like a Marine, and everyone else dressed like they belonged to a grunge band. I sat alone. The conversations behind me were about getting high, snowboarding, and weekend plans I wasn’t part of. I learned to look out the window, jaw set, hiding whatever I was feeling inside.
Missing my real home and drowning in my emotions, I didn’t want to be alive. Not in some abstract teenage melancholy way, but in a way that scared me. There were days when the sadness didn’t just sit on my shoulders; it knocked me flat. Nights when I ended up on the floor of my room, sobbing so hard my ribs hurt. Thoughts of taking my life came in waves, sharp, insistent, impossible to ignore, and I had no words for them, no one I trusted enough to tell.
Sometimes the bus window held my reflection, faint and watery, like a version of myself I wasn’t sure I recognized. I’d stare at it and think how tired that boy looked—tired of not fitting in, tired of walking on eggshells. Mostly, tired of pretending he was fine.
But even in those moments, something small kept me anchored. Maybe it was the stubborn streak I inherited from both sides of my family, the part of me that refused to be steamrolled by circumstance. Or maybe it was simply that I hadn’t yet learned how to give up.
Whatever it was, it kept me going. Kept me stepping off that bus each morning. Then, during my senior year, I walked into Mrs. Dunning’s business class for the first time, and something changed.
She stood at the front of the room, a strawberry blonde with curls just above her shoulders, late 40s, I’d say, with blue eyes that seemed to see right through you, and a posture that said she expected your attention but earned your respect. She had a presence that filled the room without needing to say much.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said, voice crisp but warm. “You’re here because you’re going to run a business. Not in theory. Not on paper. A real business, right here at Sheridan High. You’ll design it, market it, sell it, and yes, you’ll see it succeed—or fail. That’s how learning sticks.”
She walked around the room, letting her gaze linger just enough to make each of us sit up straight. “We’re going to cover work ethic. Budgeting. People skills. Product design. Pricing. Marketing. Sales. Community involvement. And you’re going to do all of it. No lectures that vanish when the bell rings. You’ll learn by doing. You’ll learn by making mistakes. And when you succeed, you’ll know why. Are we clear?”
A few students nodded, some whispered under their breath, and I sat intrigued, part curiosity, part excitement. Finally, she smiled, just a twitch at the corner of her mouth, the kind that made you want to see if you could rise to the challenge.
“I don’t expect perfection,” she continued. “I expect effort. Attention. Ingenuity. And a willingness to fail, learn, and try again.”
I realized, almost immediately, that I wanted in.
The next two semesters felt like someone had opened a door I didn’t know existed. Mrs. Dunning didn’t ease us into anything; she tossed us straight into the deep end and let us swim. Early on, we were divided into teams and were responsible for producing an actual publication for the community. Not a pretend project. Not a graded worksheet. A real thing with our school’s name on it.
At one point, I sold ad space, which meant I spent time contacting local businesses with the shaky confidence of a teenager pretending to be a professional. Half the time, I stumbled over my words. The other half, people actually bought ads, mostly because I think they admired the effort.
Inside the classroom, we worked on content, layout, and graphics. We weren’t exactly a group of budding designers. But we learned how to fix things, how to revise, and how to make something just a little better than the version before.
Mrs. Dunning would circle the room, pointing out a mistake here and there, asking questions that forced us to think: “Why do you think this headline doesn’t work?” “Why do you think your first sentence doesn’t grab the reader?” “What’s your plan if the printer delays your order?”
It wasn’t perfect. We weren’t perfect. But week by week, the publication took shape. And somewhere in that messy, ink-smudged process, I realized I was waking up each morning wanting to see what came next.
I still remember one day when the rest of the class had drifted off to their stations and I was reorganizing something. Mrs. Dunning leaned against the corner of my table, rubbing her temples like she’d been staring at a screen for too long.
“You look exhausted,” I said before I could stop myself.
She gave a dry little laugh. “That’s because I am. I was up until two this morning.”
“Grading?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “A personal project.”
I don’t recall whether she was trying to learn a new design program or had a spreadsheet question; I only know that she’d wrestled with it until she won.
“I finally figured it out around one thirty.”
I blinked. “You stayed up until two…?”
“Yep,” she said, stepping away, back into her orbit around the room, but the moment stayed with me.
At the time, I just knew I admired Mrs. Dunning. This was someone who treated her own projects with the same seriousness she expected from ours. She showed me, without ever saying it outright, that work worth doing requires persistence. That finishing something, really finishing it, requires the kind of commitment no one applauds while you’re doing it.
Today, when I’m stuck in the middle of my own creative projects—early morning writing sessions, revisions that seem endless, designs that refuse to come together—I think of her. Of that small, almost throwaway confession about staying up until two in the morning to wrestle her work into submission.
And I realized she’d given me one of the first real truths about making anything: You keep going, even when no one’s watching.
I found the assignments in Mrs. Dunning’s class to be fun, and I got to create things.
I remember the day I had to give a ten-minute business presentation that would be filmed “for evaluation,” a phrase that made it sound like the stakes were higher than they actually were. I wandered into the room, trying to pretend I wasn’t terrified, wearing a thrift-store suit from the Salvation Army, too big in the shoulders, smelling faintly of someone else’s life. The tie was the wrong color for the suit, but it made me feel like a man with something to say.
The chairs were in perfect rows, the camcorder perched on a tripod; classmates slouching, doing their best to mimic a real audience. I stood at the front, inching closer to the mic. My palms were damp; my throat felt too narrow for air.
Then I took one long breath, the kind that feels like you’re starting a race, and something shifted. My voice came out steady. Then stronger. My ideas lined up like they’d been waiting for their cue. Look, I can do this, I thought. I belong here.
The room leaned in. In the quiet, unmistakable way an audience does when it decides you’re worth listening to. A couple of classmates nodded. Another smiled. And for the first time in a long time, I felt the ground steady under my feet.
That was the moment I caught the bug. The realization that persuasive communication is its own kind of electricity. With the right words, you can pull people toward you, hold their attention, and even guide it. It was intoxicating. I wanted more of it.
Respect, admiration. Those were things I hadn’t received in a long time. But I felt a glimmer of them then, warm and surprising, like someone had cracked open a window in a stuffy room.
And the clouds of sadness that had hung over me for a year plus began, slowly, to lift. Not because I’d given a perfect presentation, but because I’d found something inside myself I didn’t know existed.
Walking out of that classroom, thrift-store suit jacket slung over my shoulder, I knew, without knowing how, that I was going to go places in the world. I didn’t yet know the locations of those places, or the stories I’d end up telling. I just knew this: Words could open doors. And I had finally found one I wanted to walk through. That door was college.
Word Count: 2,033
Here are six “writing” takeaways from this chapter:
The Beginning
1. Lead with the truth, not the decoration.
I began with a blunt line: “Everything else about my life, I hated.” No throat-clearing. No setup. Just truth.
Try This: Write the first sentence of your chapter as if you were whispering the real story in confidence to a friend. Keep it clean. Keep it direct.
2. Ground the reader in a specific loss.
I didn’t simply say I moved and was sad. I showed the precise world I lost. Enid golf courses, Mazzio’s pizza, inside jokes. Details create ache.
Try This: Make a short list of the “small specifics” that defined the world you left behind. Put two of them in your opening paragraph.
The Middle
3. Use contrast to sharpen pain.
The coldness at home versus the purity of the mountains; the grunge kids versus my Marine-style haircut; the isolation versus the bus window reflection. Contrast is my scalpel.
Try This: Identify a scene where your internal world clashed with your external world. Write both sides in two clean sentences. Let them rub.
4. Show the moment the wind shifts.
Mrs. Dunning doesn’t appear with fireworks—she appears with presence, clarity, standards. That’s all a turning point needs. A teacher who sees you. A room that feels different.
Try This: Pinpoint a moment when someone changed the direction of your story by 5 degrees, not 90. Write the moment in 3 sentences, no more.
The End
5. Let growth show in a single brave act.
My ten-minute presentation became the stage where the reader sees my confidence ignite. I didn’t tell you I was changing—I showed the change happening in real time.
Try This: Choose one small moment—walking into a room, making a phone call, opening a letter—to illustrate a big internal shift. Write the scene in motion.
6. End with the door opening, not closing.
I close not with a summary, but with movement: walking out in a thrift-store suit, the newfound sense of direction, the door of college swinging open. Memoir endings should lift.
Try This: Rewrite your final paragraph so it ends with a forward-leaning image—your feet moving, the light changing, a door opening.
