Undergraduate / 'Age 5 to 18' - learning more about you and the context in which you have grown up [11]

We are interested in learning more about you and the context in which you have grown up, formed your aspirations and accomplished your academic successes. Please describe the factors and challenges that have most shaped your personal life and aspirations. How have these factors caused you to grow?

Age 5
His foot thundered down the stairs, followed by the heavy plod of his prosthetic leg. My brothers and my sister froze. The creak of the wood floor bellowed out a harsh entanglement of tones as he pivoted around the corner. The previous moment the four of us had been fighting, screaming the only obscenities our adolescent heads were capable of conceiving. The present moment, however, brought the former to an abrupt cessation. The moment was now prisoner, ready to be exploited and eviscerated by my father's inevitable, upcoming diatribe. The air was pure, while just for an instant, with a lingering, placid silence. The moment passed, shattered by his vitriolic release. "Animals! That's what I have raised! Animals!" I did not cry.

Age 9
I turned up to school with cracked ribs on a December morning. Four fine lines of crimson left a venomous trail down the length of my arm. Navy and indigo hues stained my ashen neck. Hair tipped with the frost of the snow, I desperately tried to conceal the imperfections that besmirched my body. I feared sympathy more than the braided-woven leather of his belt. Another day infested with silence was considered a success. I ambled home, futilely battling the belligerent chill in my windbreaker. Walking through the provisional arch of a doorway, I ducked my head under to find the dark house encased in a disconcerting silence. The peace was shattered by a potent, unrestrained cry. My legs took care of the rest, guiding my body toward the distressed voice. My mother, home early, sat on her mattress, enveloped in doleful sobs. She told me to get in the car and I tentatively obliged. The car ride was drowned in laconic speech. Few words were exchanged. We pulled up to a hospital, exited our vehicle, and made our way up to Pediatrics on the fourth floor. Eight years old, he was lying in the hospital with porcelain skin matching my own. A moribund state infected his once vivacious presence. He would not make it. I did not cry.

Age 11
The animal raiser was gone now. Fleeing our home, he had left my mom alone with my brother, my sister, and me. I desperately searched for the positives in his abandonment. With my younger brother long gone, my mother was only responsible for four mouths, including her own. My father's choice to relinquish his family from his ownership meant no more name-calling and no more hiding and no more purple skin. Despite my attempts to maintain a feigned veneer, I contended an optimistic view could stand to be suppressed for a while. I pressed into my mother's velvet skin, desperate to feel some sense of human compassion. I felt my eyes swelling under the burden of oncoming tears and I stifled them back. I did not cry.

Age 12
The four of us lived in a motel. I woke up one night, street lights still illustrious in their brilliance, to hear my mother arguing in despondency with the manager. I heard her cry. I heard her yell. I heard her beg. She cried of her loss of pride and fell to the floor, desiccated and distraught. She later helped me lie about my age to secure my chances for employment. I held down a part-time job at White Castle and babysat late on school nights in an effort to pay rent on the room. Despite the exasperating struggle between homework and work, I felt I was happy. I did not cry.

Age 18
I dedicated a multitude of years craving a daddy-daughter dance. I have been waiting to be called "Princess" or "Daddy's Girl" by the man whose approval I so desperately sought. While I did not necessarily receive such approbation, a more auspicious aptitude found its way to me. Although it would be to asseverate my father's egregious conduct was worthy of perdition, I resolutely believe he was responsible for fabricating my most propitious qualities. I hold my father, and my father alone, responsible for my addiction to volunteer work. Service provides me with the sensation that I cannot fail; I dedicate my time to those with no other resource, which establishes an inimitable sense of self beyond any stretch of the imagination. Witnessing the impact I now know I am capable of, that I may transcend past the status of mere "animal," extinguishes the once pernicious life I lived and paved way for gratification. I have the capacity to offer happiness and change, and as I let my eyes engorge themselves behind the undulations of immense pressure experienced only through this absolute contentment, trails of salt water swathe my ghost cheeks and I cry.

Undergraduate / UVA Supplement - Challenging/Unsettling Piece of Art, Music, Science... [4]

Hi everyone!! This is the first draft of my UVA supplement, so I know it is a little rough. Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated. Did I answer the question too vaguely? Thank you so much!!

College of Arts and Sciences: What work of art, music, science, mathematics, or literature has surprised, unsettled, or challenged you, and in what way?

The muffled moaning that seeped from his speakers was enough. I pressed the buds into my ears, desperately begging the voice of Justin Timberlake to surpass the belligerent, bellowing sound system. Intuitively, I rolled my eyes at the authority figure responsible for my agonizing discomfort. My eyes mutated into burning daggers, vitriolic in their attempts to initiate a stare-down contest with my happily head-bobbing teacher.

This is the effect Irish dance music has on me. I sacrificed nearly a decade and a half to this particular dance form. While I will not dare dispute its beauty in performance, the symmetrical, eight-beat measures of Irish music which usurp my insanity are not beautiful. Rather, they are toddlers, infantile antagonists, vehemently beseeching my attention. My feet begin to tap instinctively from thirteen years of training. Soon they are flailing awkwardly in the limited space under my desk, while curious and cruel classmates look on. God save me. My ghost cheeks yield to candy apple hues, angrily enflaming my flesh. I pressed harder into my ears, hoping Tim McGraw would be successful in drowning out the provocative tune. A mild groan drained from the hollows of my throat.

I figured once I escaped the dance realm, an exclusive world that allowed me to enjoy the music that guided my shoestring-tangled feet, I would no longer fall subject to the memory-evoking cadences. I did not expect to encounter what I perceived as my health teacher's sadistic choice in music. Although I enjoy the art of Irish dance when I am among others abandoning their adolescence in dedication, it has been a challenge to ignore the malicious comments directed toward my atypical hobby.

I may curse my disobedient feet, impatient to perform, but I curse the music simply for evoking an interminable poignancy within me. My teacher's callous taste in music tortures my desperate feet, thirsty for activity. It was too much of a challenge. My scarlet countenance faded into my usual pale complexion as I relinquished my ears from the pop artist flow, allowing them to indulge in the flawless bars of the Celtic music.

Undergraduate / 'My mother - my favorite person, my friend' - Significant Person and Impact [3]

Hi everyone :) I am really nervous about this essay and I know it is a little rough. I am in DESPERATE need of any and all help, even if it's just a quick read over.

Thank you so so much!

Tell us about a person who has influenced you in a significant way.

Maybe it's resentment. After all, I weighed nine and a half pounds at the moment of my expulsion from the womb. Maybe it's embarrassment. At the tender age of four, the "s-word" escaped my red Kool-Aid stained lips, a result of overhearing my dad's Pulp Fiction movie. Of course, the embarrassment was all the more exacerbated as I chose to utter this vulgarity in the presence of mother's Catholic retreat group. Regardless of the reason, she remained adamant on the fact we weren't friends.

Eight-year-old eyes, staring up at the woman towering before me, embodying all the innocence in the world, filled with tears. Two years later, ten-year-old eyes, staring a little less up, embodying a little less innocence, arrived at the same fate. "No, we're not friends." As naïve purity drained from my aging psyche, an inchoate sense of hopelessness took its place. If my inability to institute a simple friendship with my own mother was any indication of future relationships with other human beings, I was prepared to become a self-proclaimed recluse, shying away from human interaction. My mother is not some sadist, thriving off the tears of the weak (no, that title is proudly claimed by my siblings). Rather, she formed this outlandish theory that, as a teenager, I was not permitted to identify my mother as my friend. Until my face flushed in front of eighteen glowing candles and my ears were subject to tone-deaf friends stammering over "Happy Birthday" lyrics, my mother would maintain her position as my mother and nothing more. At eighteen, if luck allowed, I might find myself fortunate and privileged enough to craft something more than a mother-daughter relationship. So my quest for friendship before my eighteenth birthday commenced.

I labored for years, suffered through blood, sweat, and tears, craving those three words: "We are friends." Nightmares in flashback-style assaulted my once pleasant dreams and embedded themselves between the neural tissues of my cerebral cortex. These nightmares transported me to preschool, when Ryan Johnson refused to be my friend. I thirsted for his friendship. Primarily because I managed to develop a crush on this boy and I, being the intellectually curious person that I am, wanted to assess his motivation for kicking sand in my face at the playground. I was a preschooler for years while my mother ruled over me, a "Ryan" in my high school world.

Summer of 2010 slipped away and I landed back in classes among cornfields. The end of September crawled devilishly around the corner, bearing its notorious horns reminding me of my upcoming birthday. Seventeen, hardly a concern, no longer "sweet" at sixteen and still illegal, I sighed in remembrance of the 365 days that gawked at me with a sardonic tone. I returned home to a slightly more civil town (that is, one where people willingly and independently choose their wardrobe and one devoid of sickening amounts of corn) a few months after my birthday. My mother welcomed me at the door, bringing me into an embrace that seemed to linger. I remember she wore her hair in a loose bun, her navy blue, polka-dot dress hugging the delicate frost of her skin. The two of us spoke in a soft manner in her bedroom, catching up and reminiscing in our awkward, dysfunctional family moments. Hours later, the peppered night sky surrendered to the brilliance of a breaking dawn. We reallocated our bantering to the chill of a November morning outdoors. Enveloped in a sea of blankets, my mother held my hand as I allowed my seventeen-year-old eyes to get lost in the ocean of orange and pink comprising the heavens.

Maybe it was my inveterate condition. Maybe it was my ignorance to her seemingly indelible nature. Maybe it was some simplistic remark I whispered on our driveway that November dawn. But that day, my mother gazed at me with her forty-three-year-old eyes, clutched my hand with her own, and spoke of our friendship. She articulated these words to me so poised and structured, as if she had arranged this confession prior to our impromptu conversation. Abandoning her obdurate temperament, my mother admitted the denial of her theory, which previously seemed so flawless in its accuracy.

Friends are not the preschool boys stomping on the mud pies I worked so diligently to craft with my bare hands. They are not the middle school girls I once let cheat off of me in hopes of "upping my cool." Friends are not the eighteen-year-olds gathered around my glowing cake, sounding like dying cattle in their rendition of "Happy Birthday." A friend is the mother that refused to make my life easy, the mother that rejected my whining for attention, the mother that brought my tears to life by repudiation of a superficial friendship. A friend is the mother that theorized I would not be worthy of friendship until she knew I embodied all the qualities she sought in a friend and in herself. Until I proved trustworthy, respectful, and dependable, I would remain a juvenile, solely a daughter, in my mother's eyes. Nine years after I had discovered our lack of a comradeship, I not only disproved a dignified theory, but also acquired a friendship I would not trade for the world. She will always be my mother, my favorite person, and I am grateful to say, my best friend.