Reframing College Essays
College essays give hope. You romanticise your sorrow, your pain, your lows and highs into a delicate dance of words. Proud battle trauma. Broken yet beautiful. Despite it all, the college essay narrates, you triumph. You emerge like a phoenix, having grown kinder, not because of your circumstances, but despite. Despite your loneliness on Thursday nights. Despite the people who betrayed you, just when you needed them the most, Despite how, sometimes, your brain feels trapped, powerless, small and alone. The reader, an admissions officer, really feels for you. Not as a data point, a list of extracurriculars or a GPA, but as a living, breathing human. She roots for the hero, and gives a gold stamp of “acceptance”.
All done, you think. But these essays are a powerful act of reframing. By forcing you to frame your life as a Hollywood hero’s origin story, you witness the traumatic puzzle pieces of life coalesce. You can trace each event of your life and see the windows it opened. You reframe your victimisation into a survivor story. You begin to love the world, every piece of it, because you project hope onto all you see. You rewrite your life on your own terms, smoothening the blemishes and photoshopping the deformities. We know life doesn’t fit squarely into a tale of rebirth, but it’s the mindset of hope.
Hope is not future anticipation. Because you could wait forever, hoping. Hope is cherishing every grain of life. Hope is a state of mind. And hope is a choice. When you’re writing college essays, you choose, for extrinsic purposes, to think resilience, to see beauty, to feel transcendent and reverent, as if in the process of typing, you float home. You feel safe, not threatened. You feel divinely like you, like the best version of yourself, like future you were whispering from your shoulder, hovering like a guardian angel. You feel comfortable in your own skin, glimpsing a brighter future.
In writing, you conjure the best version of yourself, and into reality. So when life disappoints, take a breath, and reminisce about the hopes you wrote into your college essays. And know that you only hoped because you believed in yourself. So no matter where you are, remember that you can keep coding, and let the oneness of purpose find you again.