What is your personal credo?
I remember at the beginning of this year, someone asked me: “What is your favorite movie?” I sat there and honestly couldn’t name anything. I couldn’t even respond with the last movie I’d seen because it had been so long.
These seemingly mundane questions kept popping up in conversations: “What’s your favorite book?” “What’s your favorite song?”, “What’s your favorite color?” I didn’t even know how to answer anymore.
I tried to brush off this observation because who has time to really focus on such “frivolous” stuff while writing college apps, trying to keep up with classes, and extracurriculars? Yet, it didn’t sit well with me that I couldn’t answer basic questions about myself.
When you have to sit and think about what your favorite color is or what your favorite food is there’s something wrong. It’s almost like not being able to say your own name. It’s like being a robot and just going through motions without truly living.
The robot I had become was a result of my desire to be seen as “perfect”. This desire began even before I came to Uni, but really grew while I was here. The first day of orientation, I remember everyone immediately asked each other what their SSAT score was. While I felt confident in mine, I started to think that I needed to always be able to impress people if they asked. So began the cycle that ultimately made me as boring as an automaton.
In the pursuit of perfection, I avoided some opportunities and challenges to maintain my supposed aura of “perfection”. I wouldn’t speak up in discussions because I was afraid my opinions were wrong or would conflict with someone else’s ideas. I wouldn’t hang out with friends because I thought the lost time would take away from my quality of work. I wouldn’t pursue some challenges for fear of failure. I was content to never push my boundaries so that I wouldn’t fail. The drive to be perfect was actually more destructive than constructive, I wasn’t truly living in my own right, rather I was living through the lens of what I thought society had created as the ideal person--in reality these unrealistic expectations made me even farther from it.
Each day, I wanted to put something good into the world, to do well in school, and make people around me happy. I wanted to be perfect. Yet, what is it worth if I’m not smiling and happy myself? What is it worth if I’ve lost myself in the work I do so much that I can’t even truly say what I really like anymore? No longer am I in the pursuit of perfection, but I’ve come to learn that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.
MY THOUGHTS: So this is very rough in its current state, what suggestions do you have to add transitions and length? Is the narration/reflection well balanced? Thanks!
I noticed the unconventional spacing between sentences/paragraphs/ideas throughout the essay. I know people have been having formatting problems on their blogs recently, so I'm not sure if this was on purpose, but I actually liked it. Scrolling through the essay while reading it (for some reason), made it flow better. I may have to try this technique.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think you should try adding in more specific, personal stories into the story to help the reader learn more about you. Good essay overall though.
I think this is a great start of your essay. I love the voice. I think that the next steps would be to think about what your favorite foods are or used to be and why. Figure it out in this essay. break it down. can you not decide between 12 different ones? tell us all twelve. I think you need to answer these questions you are posing to this reader. Finally, I think a great ending would be to commit yourself to changing this pattern. How will you do better in college? I feel the same way as you.. I feel like I lost my childhood and it wasn't even worth it.. so I've made a list of stupid things ill do in college and incredibly boring impressive stuff I won't allow myself to pursue (even though I always said I wanted to (we both know I didn't want to)) Finally, to really get close to the reader I think a confession would work really well as a transition to your commitment of what you'll do differently. Tell us about a club you joined or a class you took that you had no interest in but just did it for your resume. tell us how horrible that was. tell us if you'd do it again. Or tell us about a party you skipped to do homework and how you just ended up sitting on snapchat looking at pics of it anyway. something like that. these are super relatable experiences and I think would fit right in with this theme.
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