not a draft of my common app essay

               It was supposed to be. I’ve been screaming at myself to write some kind of a draft of that essay since August and until this Monday I had literally nothing. Making it into a blog post gave me a deadline, which is what I needed. Now I have 1200 words written in a Google doc, which, if you do the math, could be two complete iterations of the eventual essay. But really it’s still a mess: two introductions, both of which were richly, eloquently, and unnecessarily embroidered and thus 250 words long and had to be cut, and seven body paragraphs when only four could possibly fit in the real thing and none of them remotely make sense. There’s no hint of a conclusion yet. I keep hitting 650 words halfway through the story and without making any of the point I’m trying to get across.

              This is the story I’m trying to tell. During the first shift I ever worked as a lifeguard, I failed three consecutive VRTs -- “victim recognition training,” or practice saves -- which basically means that three times, a manager jumped in and pretended to drown, and three times in a row I didn’t jump in to save them. Instead I sat frozen in the guard chair because I was too afraid that I’d be wrong, and embarrass myself by jumping in and making a scene for nothing. This is significant because at the time, my entire identity revolved around on never making mistakes like this, always being a good student and obeying all the rules and obsessively spinning every possible comment around in my head before I said it, and now I had just flat-out failed three times in a row and earned me two of the three write-ups required to get me fired from my first job before the summer had even started in the process. For the first time, this wasn't a problem that I could study my way out of; I had to learn to trust my own decisions and not be so terrified of making mistakes. The moral of the story is that by the end of the summer I realized that the world won’t implode around me if I make a mistake by jumping in at the wrong time. In the end, I didn't get fired. I learned from my mistakes, and became a better person! Or I just got more comfortable with making rash decisions. It depends on how you look at it. Admissions committee, are you inspired yet?

             This is an absolutely ridiculous thing to write an college essay about and I know it. The prompt says, obstacles we encounter can be instrumental to future success. In seventeen years, is this really the biggest obstacle I’ve faced?

              No, of course not. But I also can’t bring myself to write about any obstacle that’s more real, that doesn’t wrap itself up into a moral at the end. Even this one, which does completely wrap up into a moral, is hard enough. If I can’t even condense one summer into 650 words or less, how am I going to be able to cram seventeen years worth of explanatory character development, potent enough to justify exactly who I am to some strangers three states away, into the same 650? It’s easier to choose one tiny story to tell. You can polish it up, and polish the facet of your personality it reveals, too. Fact-check the story I told above against my soul, my transcript, or anyone I’ve ever met and you’ll be confirmed at every junction. If I tried to write something deep and meaningful, who knows what would happen.

                 And I also absolutely refuse to write something deep and meaningful because if I did I wouldn’t want any of you to read it and I would want a random stranger, about to arbitrate the next four years of my life, to read it even less. A real obstacle is complicated and at least in my words it can’t fit into a 650-word box on the common app. There’s no moral at the end of the story, and if it’s shaped you enough, there’s no one shard of personality to shine up until it reflects exactly who you want it to.

               So I’m sticking to my story that VRTs  were so instrumental to my life. I'll keep wrestling with my 1200 word document until it spits out a varnished pebble of personality that is just compelling enough to catch the eye of an admissions officer. And that will be the story of my college application, and of this delirious late-night blog post. The end.