The course was not free. It cost twenty-two hundred dollars, which I paid from my savings without discussion or hesitation.
This is what I mean when I say that what I wanted was for my savings to belong to my decisions. Not that I was being selfish. Not that I was punishing anyone. Just that twenty-eight thousand dollars is a significant number, and I built it from nothing, and what I do with it is up to me.
The first session was on a Monday evening. I took a bus that left with enough time that I didn’t have to run. I sat in the third row. The professor started by asking what each person hoped to learn by the end of the twelve weeks.
When it got to me, I said I wanted to understand how to use operational data to make healthcare delivery more efficient. Which is true. And also, somewhere in that answer, there was a smaller and more specific thing: I wanted to be in a room where something was just for me. Where the seat was mine and the learning was mine and the future the course was aimed at was mine.
No one in the room knew anything about my family.
I liked that.
The bus home ran until eleven-thirty. I caught it with time to spare, sat in a window seat, and watched the city go by in the particular way it looks on a dark Monday night — lit from inside, everyone going somewhere, nobody knowing where anyone else had been.