- Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.
I just drafted this tonight; it's based on my very recent experiences moving. I was hoping for a narrative-style feel with a metaphorical effect, but I'll let you guys judge that :P I fear it may be too long (997 words). I also am concerned that the basic idea may be stale.
I appreciate any comments and critiques, and thank everyone in advance for spending the time to look through my essay.
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I crippled a tiny insect yesterday. It was a small, brightly colored beetle skittering across the unforgiving terrain of my keyboard with surprising speed. I struck it with a magazine and then witnessed the crippled, tiny insect curl up inside the shallow cradle made by a key. Beetles aren't sentient, but I felt the bug was experiencing his last seconds of life leak out of him like the fluids leaking out of his wrecked shell. I sympathized.
I had been where the beetle was now. One day my mother, turning around from her cooking to cough violently, told me her doctors had found a lingering pleural effusion. I should have known better than to hope it wasn't that. Lung cancer doesn't happen to just anyone, does it? I found out two weeks later that it does.
Hope is unquenchable, a fire indiscriminately sucking air. Though as relentless and resilient as a fire is, when it's entirely smothered, it dies. My situation seemed hopeless, like a fire dying. A five-person home in Northbrook, IL couldn't survive with its sole breadwinner in the hospital, receiving palliative chemotherapy. My sophomore year did not end on a high note; I could not escape the inevitable: A few hours after the very last class of the year, my belongings and I were squeezed into the backseat, traveling to Virginia where my unfamiliar father and stepmother could take me in. I despaired.
That sad, crippled beetle had no escape. The shortest escape route was an impossibly epic journey. The beetle's time was up; his movements were becoming progressively less aggressive, less frequent. He was slipping into the hopeless void called despair, where time is dilated and nothing but the most present agony is perceived as lasting forever.
Riding toward the east-coast in that backseat, I tallied how many hits I had taken. I was going into a strange new place, stripped of my friends, my family, and seemingly, my opportunities. The personal jacket I had built up at my old school - a member of the prestigious Glenbrook Academy for International Studies, a rising policy-debater, a leader to many friends and teammates - were being left behind. And my mom was dying.
But the beetle surprised me. I was so sure the pathetic curling of its legs was an omen of imminent death. But in fact, as I turned back to view a crushed bug, I saw a proud beetle making its getaway! The limping arthropod, with its cracked shell, its bruised and bloodied insides, and its foe staring right at him, was hobbling off the keyboard to safety.
Somewhere along the line, a realization became plain as day to me. I remembered my mom and envisioned her own pain. Who was really crippled? I couldn't save her, but I could make her proud. Opportunities I thought were lost were merely permuted. Junior year became my high-school career's finest hour. We took our problems, that beetle and I, and made it our struggle to carry on.
People with no predisposition, no precedent for suffering, still somehow suffer in our absurd world. The beetle had no gripe with me. My mother never smoked or had a family history of cancer. I couldn't save her, but if I were a doctor, I could save others who encounter similar fates. When I settled into my new Virginian room, as cold and foreign to me as the beetle likely found my keyboard, I resolved not to die quietly with nothing to show for my life.
I survived the move because I realized survival is inadequate. I insist to exist for a distinct purpose. Despair missed an ember the day I moved: the hope that I can make my short existence meaningful and worth living by helping others. That ember grew into my strongest fire. Death became just a time-limit, before which I have to fit in as much hard work and meaningful existence as possible.
I just drafted this tonight; it's based on my very recent experiences moving. I was hoping for a narrative-style feel with a metaphorical effect, but I'll let you guys judge that :P I fear it may be too long (997 words). I also am concerned that the basic idea may be stale.
I appreciate any comments and critiques, and thank everyone in advance for spending the time to look through my essay.
---
I crippled a tiny insect yesterday. It was a small, brightly colored beetle skittering across the unforgiving terrain of my keyboard with surprising speed. I struck it with a magazine and then witnessed the crippled, tiny insect curl up inside the shallow cradle made by a key. Beetles aren't sentient, but I felt the bug was experiencing his last seconds of life leak out of him like the fluids leaking out of his wrecked shell. I sympathized.
I had been where the beetle was now. One day my mother, turning around from her cooking to cough violently, told me her doctors had found a lingering pleural effusion. I should have known better than to hope it wasn't that. Lung cancer doesn't happen to just anyone, does it? I found out two weeks later that it does.
Hope is unquenchable, a fire indiscriminately sucking air. Though as relentless and resilient as a fire is, when it's entirely smothered, it dies. My situation seemed hopeless, like a fire dying. A five-person home in Northbrook, IL couldn't survive with its sole breadwinner in the hospital, receiving palliative chemotherapy. My sophomore year did not end on a high note; I could not escape the inevitable: A few hours after the very last class of the year, my belongings and I were squeezed into the backseat, traveling to Virginia where my unfamiliar father and stepmother could take me in. I despaired.
That sad, crippled beetle had no escape. The shortest escape route was an impossibly epic journey. The beetle's time was up; his movements were becoming progressively less aggressive, less frequent. He was slipping into the hopeless void called despair, where time is dilated and nothing but the most present agony is perceived as lasting forever.
Riding toward the east-coast in that backseat, I tallied how many hits I had taken. I was going into a strange new place, stripped of my friends, my family, and seemingly, my opportunities. The personal jacket I had built up at my old school - a member of the prestigious Glenbrook Academy for International Studies, a rising policy-debater, a leader to many friends and teammates - were being left behind. And my mom was dying.
But the beetle surprised me. I was so sure the pathetic curling of its legs was an omen of imminent death. But in fact, as I turned back to view a crushed bug, I saw a proud beetle making its getaway! The limping arthropod, with its cracked shell, its bruised and bloodied insides, and its foe staring right at him, was hobbling off the keyboard to safety.
Somewhere along the line, a realization became plain as day to me. I remembered my mom and envisioned her own pain. Who was really crippled? I couldn't save her, but I could make her proud. Opportunities I thought were lost were merely permuted. Junior year became my high-school career's finest hour. We took our problems, that beetle and I, and made it our struggle to carry on.
People with no predisposition, no precedent for suffering, still somehow suffer in our absurd world. The beetle had no gripe with me. My mother never smoked or had a family history of cancer. I couldn't save her, but if I were a doctor, I could save others who encounter similar fates. When I settled into my new Virginian room, as cold and foreign to me as the beetle likely found my keyboard, I resolved not to die quietly with nothing to show for my life.
I survived the move because I realized survival is inadequate. I insist to exist for a distinct purpose. Despair missed an ember the day I moved: the hope that I can make my short existence meaningful and worth living by helping others. That ember grew into my strongest fire. Death became just a time-limit, before which I have to fit in as much hard work and meaningful existence as possible.
