When I stared at the blank textbox on the Common Application in late August of 2013, desperately trying to come up with a compelling essay, I realized that a lot of bad things had happened to me in my sixteen years of existence. I had a teacher that once told me that when he read a student’s writing, and it was truly excellent, he always felt a little sad, because he knew that the most brilliant writers are usually the ones who have experienced the most tragedy. My friend’s envied that I had many options for what to write my essay about, when the most “exciting” things in their lives like breaking an arm seemed disappointingly ordinary. Still, my screen stayed blank for weeks. I had two great stories, but I was hung up on the cliché of writing about abstract concepts like loss and adversity.

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I didn’t want some college admissions essay reader to let me in out of pity or think that I was trying to make people feel sorry for me. I also didn’t want to write the horribly cliché “I faced a near impossible obstacle, but I’m so special that I overcame it.” I thought that these painful memories were doomed to die between the pages of my journal, never to be told to the world. As the college application deadline rapidly approached and my textbox was still blank, I knew I had to write about something. I had boiled it down to two options: the overdone dead parent pity essay or the painfully predictable girl loses ability to walk and, despite all odds, learns to walk again. I chose the latter, and I wrote my very first draft of an essay about what it was spending part of my childhood confined to a wheelchair and part of it learning how to walk again. I didn’t know then that this essay would go on to be rewritten half a dozen times over the next four years.