Sheri Dew: Living the unexpected life

"I had a lot of friends who were boys," she says. "I played ball with them, but we didn't date. They didn't ask me that much because I wasn't cute enough or because I didn't drink or party. I had friends who were girls, but again, at a certain point in your adolescence they start doing things I couldn't do — drinking, sleeping around. There was this understanding that I just didn't do those things. I was a friend during school time, but not much after that. By the time I got to BYU, I was a social mess, an absolute misfit. There is not a shyer, more pathetic kid who stepped on that BYU campus than me."

Dew was an A student. She played keyboards and piano in BYU-sponsored USO groups that toured the world and for a time considered becoming a concert pianist. She was a star athlete. But none of that compensated for what she couldn't do.

"By the time you hit your early 20s, you've had reinforced for you what you've always feared — I must not be very cute or attractive or funny," she says. "Whatever it is that attracts guys. I still haven't figured that out yet. You see all your friends getting married, every size and shape of friend gets married but you. It internalizes in you that there must be something defective in you, . . . but at some point you have to come to terms with who you are in life. I can tell you when it started, but it's been a long, long process."

It started when she was in graduate school at BYU. Crushed by another relationship with a man that "didn't go anywhere," she packed her bags and drove to Kansas, showing up at home unannounced in the middle of the week.

She moped around the house for a few days and then one afternoon found herself in her younger brother's room, where she began thumbing through his journal. She read this entry: "My sister Sheri came home today. I was so excited to see her, but she seems really sad. I wish there was something I could do to help her because I really love her."

"I just started to cry," she says, "but it also triggered one of those clear moments of inspiration. I had a very clear impression that I should quit worrying about what I didn't have, because I had plenty, and that I needed to do something with what I'd been given. At that point, my view of the world started very slowly to change."

Anyone for Game Boy?

When you want to meet with Sheri Dew, this is what you do: Leave messages. And more messages. And wait. For weeks. When you do meet, it's at her office, between other meetings, which is where she spends most of her waking hours.

Dew has performed two full-time jobs for five years, plus a part-time job as an author. To accomplish that, she maintains a schedule that would exhaust a teenager. She goes to bed at 10:30 or so, and she's up by 3:45, sometimes even 2:30.