I don't know why, but writing a Personal Statement, the kind required for college appliations, has always tormented me. Which is funny because it's sort of what I'm doing each time I post to this blog, writing a personal statement of some sort. But when it comes down to having to write one on topic for an application that requires me to stand out from the thousands of other applicants in 500-1000 words, be funny and clever and leave the reader with a lasting impression, I tense up. I freeze. I utterly choke.
Why am I rambling about personal statements? An old friend came to visit this weekend with two in her bag. She was helping friends get through their graduate application process. She asked if I wouldn't mind commenting on them. Mind? Have the chance to see other people suffer through drafts of what I've never been able to do myself? (Or what I hoped would be suffering, terrible, rotten essays.) My pleasure.
One essay was good. Okay, great. It had an interesting story about playing soccer in Bangladesh vs. playing soccer in the Bronx, places where the author grew up, and how that led to pursuing a law degree. It all fit together, just required some tightening. The other essay? Awful. The degree of awful that I have written.
Editing was a pleasure. Because it wasn't my own work, I all of a sudden knew exactly how to fix both of the essays. I gave the kind of advice that I find it impossible to follow. Find a hook. Tell a story, rather than worrying about being impressive. Give specific details. And as I commented, I kept wondering what my own personal statement from the year before looked like. (I had written one to get into graduate school.)
I slipped away and searched for it. I found it. I opened it. I read the first sentence. I felt a tightening in my chest. It was worse than I expected. I skimmed a few more lines, too painful to read the sentences consecutively. As bad as I remembered it being, it was worse. I felt shame. I wanted to confess to the world. I wanted to be sure anyone who had read the statement either forgot about it or hadn't written me off as a complete moron. Pretentious moron.
What was especially hard to understand: if I knew all these rules for my fiction writing, why o why was it so hard to apply it to this personal statement? Is it an irrational fear? Like the one that keeps me from jumping off cliffs or rope swings of any kind? The fear that blocks me from writing anything but terrible, vague sentences?
There's really no point here. Or maybe I am too tired to make a point. Or maybe the point is that all of my personal statements, blog or otherwise, are bound to not have a point. Looking back at this entry, I failed again to include any sort of specific, physical detail. Like how I am sitting at my desk at 1am on a Sunday night waiting for the dog meat on the stove to brown so I can go to bed. And how I am tired but felt like writing something besides a reaction paper to Chekhov stories, and here I am. How the smell of the meat is getting more intense, which means I can probably extinguish the burner, refrigerate the meat and go to bed.
