The following is my personal essay that I wrote for the Common App. I chose prompt number 4 which was: Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma — anything of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
I crumbled into the corner of the hallway and cried the kind of cry that strips away your ability to breathe, the kind that fills your chest with pain, the kind that leaves you exhausted and beaten. My parents didn’t know what was happening to me as the pace of my breath quickened and my body fell into itself. I didn’t have the rational mind to explain that I had woken up five minutes late and wasn’t able to finish the last problem on my math homework. God, how would I even explain that to them, tell them that I was falling apart because I’d put my alarm on snooze for five minutes? Five minutes and my whole world crashed down on top of me. When I finally caught my breath and my tears began to dry I looked up and saw the aching confusion in my parents’ eyes. That was it, my turning point, the inciting incident in the story of my life. Soon enough I started therapy. My first session ended with a long diagnosis: OCD, general anxiety, panic disorder, depression. As my world picked up the pace with treatment sheets and failed remedies and nights of endless screaming and crying, I started to lose myself in my own head. I felt so isolated. My parents tried to make me feel better, by telling me that I wasn’t the only one on this path, but if that was really true why did I still feel so alone? No one talked about mental illness unless it was overly romanticized, unless it was a punchline, unless it was a dramatized caricature of reality. The only place I could find solace was in my writing.
Writing was my escape. I wrote after every panic attack, every bad day, every moment of hopelessness and used my pencil to climb out of the pit in my stomach. I found that with every sentence I felt freer and allowed myself to let the emotions that were pouring from my mind envelope me. Writing was, is, my escape. It is my safe haven. It is the thing that has given me a companion amidst my isolation, the thing that has helped me realize I’m not actually in isolation. My parents were right, and I hate to admit it, but they were. I am not the only one on this path and I am not the only one who feels alone on this path. The only reason that I have felt so isolated for so long is because of the fluff and the lies that fill the conversation around mental health. It barricades people who are struggling into their own personal solitudes and I, quite frankly, am tired of feeling alone. Writing is my escape. It is a tool, one that I am using to tear down the obstacles that have prevented me from being able to see I’m not alone, and one that I plan to share.
I have thousands of stories to write about, ones that I used to pray someone else would tell so that I could feel understood, but the thing is they are my stories and while that seems quite obvious now, it has taken me years to fully understand that I am the one who needs to tell those stories. I am the only one who can tell those stories because I not only know that what I write can pull someone out of their own head and give them a safe place of understanding, but that what I write can also add more authenticity to the conversation around mental health. I am tired of seeing mental health portrayed as a controversial topic, one that is riddled with assumptions and misleadings. I am determined to end the stigma that surrounds mental health and bring a clearer cognizance of what mental illnesses entail to people who don’t understand, yet at least.