I had a full-circle moment last month. To understand, I need to provide you with a bit of my history.

When I graduated from college, my plan was to become a schoolteacher and write during the summers. But I needed a break before continuing my education. So, I took a job as a teaching assistant in a one-room schoolhouse located in Bear Valley, California, a tiny High Sierra resort.

I was 21 years old, teaching English and more to approximately 30 kindergartner-through-8th-grade students. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that experience would actually prove to be the start of my writing coach career. One Halloween, the kids and I listened to a recording of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and discussed how Edgar Allan Poe had managed to make the story so incredibly creepy. Then they set out to write their own stories, after which we met one-on-one to discuss not their mistakes, but how they could make their stories scarier. As I recalled in a prior post, the rewrites were so effective, I couldn’t finish reading them that night, and had to leave my house in search of company and a cocktail. My students were thrilled.

Over the years, plans changed. I would spend close to five years at the resort instead of pursuing my teaching credential, and ultimately end up in New York as an assistant editor on the Ladies’ Home Journal. It would take a couple of decades for me to pick up the teaching mantle again, this time as a writing coach.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. One of my second graders at the Bear Valley Elementary School was a slender girl named Silver Stephenson, whose mother used to cut her hair by putting a bowl over her head and trimming accordingly. We were 14 years apart, a gap that ceased to matter as we got older and became friends when I moved to San Francisco in 1999 after my mom got sick. Having gotten into web design and promotion by that point, Silvia—the name she goes by as an adult—was the one who convinced me to start blogging more than 25 years ago, which is one of the reasons my website often ranks on page 1, 2, or 3 of Google.

Last week, Silvia, who has become an artificial intelligence consultant in addition to working as a product design leader, start-up strategist, and website designer, flew up to Bend to be my AI coach. I wanted to gain at least a basic understanding of how AI works and explore how my clients and I might be able to use it in our work. Four days later, I walked away with monster insights, an admitted sense of overwhelm and possibility, and immense gratitude for a friendship that has taken a 180° turn. The student is now the teacher.