Hey guys. This is the first draft of my essay for the prompt:
Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once said, "Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view." With this in mind, describe a moment when your perspective changed.
The essay is supposed to be 2000 characters max, and mine is about 2400. Any revisions and/or advice for cuts would be greatly appreciated!
I'm what you might call "athletically inept". You know that gene, the one that gives you coordination, speed, and strength? Yeah, I never got that. At 6'3", you might assume, as many have, that I'd be a great basketball player, but the sport never clicked for me. Neither did baseball, soccer, tennis, or any of the other popular pastimes I attempted during my childhood. But I kept trying, hoping that eventually I'd find my niche in the athletic community. And when I moved to Virginia, right before the start of high school, I knew I'd have to find something.
So in the winter of my freshman year, I joined Indoor Track, running as hard as I could every day, carrying out every drill to the fullest. At the start I was always last by a long shot, but that didn't surprise me. I knew that it would take time. So I stuck it out for the entire season, through every grueling practice and last place finish. And the entire time I thought to myself, "I may not be that great this year, but next year I'll be right up there." That's when the coach called me into her office for a private meeting. She wanted to know why I was slacking in practice. She thought that if I wasn't going to try my hardest, I might as well not be on the team. "Coach, I've been working my butt off to get better!" I told her, but she wouldn't hear it. She was under the impression that I was simply running track as a resume builder, not because I truly wanted to get better.
All my life I'd been trying to separate myself from that mindset that I wasn't meant to be an athlete, the idea that I would never be the MVP of a team or win the championship trophy. But that day, in that meeting with my coach, my perspective changed. I realized that maybe, just maybe, I didn't get the genes of an athlete for a reason. Maybe God gave me bad eyesight and terrible coordination to signal something to me. After that meeting, I quit the track team, and haven't played for another team since. I don't think that I quit on sports that day; rather I made a realization of what was really important to me. All my life, playing sports had been advertised as a way to be seen as "cool", to earn the respect and appreciation of others. I now know that that isn't true. Playing all of those sports was my way of trying to find an identity, but my identity didn't exist within a basketball or on an AstroTurf field, and I'm completely fine with that.
Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once said, "Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view." With this in mind, describe a moment when your perspective changed.
The essay is supposed to be 2000 characters max, and mine is about 2400. Any revisions and/or advice for cuts would be greatly appreciated!
I'm what you might call "athletically inept". You know that gene, the one that gives you coordination, speed, and strength? Yeah, I never got that. At 6'3", you might assume, as many have, that I'd be a great basketball player, but the sport never clicked for me. Neither did baseball, soccer, tennis, or any of the other popular pastimes I attempted during my childhood. But I kept trying, hoping that eventually I'd find my niche in the athletic community. And when I moved to Virginia, right before the start of high school, I knew I'd have to find something.
So in the winter of my freshman year, I joined Indoor Track, running as hard as I could every day, carrying out every drill to the fullest. At the start I was always last by a long shot, but that didn't surprise me. I knew that it would take time. So I stuck it out for the entire season, through every grueling practice and last place finish. And the entire time I thought to myself, "I may not be that great this year, but next year I'll be right up there." That's when the coach called me into her office for a private meeting. She wanted to know why I was slacking in practice. She thought that if I wasn't going to try my hardest, I might as well not be on the team. "Coach, I've been working my butt off to get better!" I told her, but she wouldn't hear it. She was under the impression that I was simply running track as a resume builder, not because I truly wanted to get better.
All my life I'd been trying to separate myself from that mindset that I wasn't meant to be an athlete, the idea that I would never be the MVP of a team or win the championship trophy. But that day, in that meeting with my coach, my perspective changed. I realized that maybe, just maybe, I didn't get the genes of an athlete for a reason. Maybe God gave me bad eyesight and terrible coordination to signal something to me. After that meeting, I quit the track team, and haven't played for another team since. I don't think that I quit on sports that day; rather I made a realization of what was really important to me. All my life, playing sports had been advertised as a way to be seen as "cool", to earn the respect and appreciation of others. I now know that that isn't true. Playing all of those sports was my way of trying to find an identity, but my identity didn't exist within a basketball or on an AstroTurf field, and I'm completely fine with that.
