Crippling an Insect (My Common App Essay)

- 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.

^Good opening line. I presume it 'skittered'.
I at first did not get the key part. I assume it is because you had scratched your table/keyboard area with a key. If not, well eitherway, that sentence can be revised.

-The bug experiencing it's fluids leaking out....I thought it did not flow too well.

This essay seems to go on and on. The unclear shift in time from the beetle, to your flashbacks, to your sophomore year have confused me and to avoid a headache, I will stop reading. Remove unnecessary details and see if you can improve the time frame so that your essay flows better.

Oh, I'm so sorry that this otherwise poignant essay ends as it does. Too bad you didn't carry the beetle outside or at least allow him or her to escape.

Thanks for the advice. After thinking about it, I definitely agree that the temporal changes were confusing. I've cut out 25% of the essay and limited it only to the event in question (moving to Virginia), and the beetle. I've also changed the sentence that Liebe didn't find smooth.

As for the ending, I'll start writing a different ending and see if I like it more, but my reasoning behind the rather grim one was to show that like the beetle, I would put 100% into whatever goal no matter how difficult it seems.

Revised version:
...

im indifferent.

okay, i know this is gonna sound...bad? but you have to keep the admissions ple in mind. sure its not about them, but being that they pick you, it kinda is whne you think about it...

after reading so many essays, the admissions ple get tired and start to skim. while this is a VERY great and well written essay, i think you should try to do the whole allegory thing still but a shortened version, as they will naturally skim your essay and not catch it COMPLETELY (well theyll catch it, but i mean not all).

it is VERY good, but will only be fully read if one has time and one isnt reading over 10000+ essays. but since thats not the case, find a way to do it this well with less details and words and things as such.

good luck!

Yea I thought that this essay still has a great deal of verbosity to it. Also, the beetle at the start was interesting, because I assumed that you would be going for an equally interesting analogy. Then when you introduced your mom, in the second paragraph, I knew where the essay was going. I skim read, and I was pretty much on target. So all of the stuff in the middle needs to either be revised or removed. Whilst I am not suggesting that you write any longer, what I am suggesting is that you make the essay less predictable. I read an essay similar to this before on this very site, therefore I kind of knew where it was going.


^If you remove that, the preceding sentence flows in with the next paragraph which is fine. This is all detail, and whilst well written, it's usefulness is subject to opinion.

By removing this, you are getting to the point, and avoiding the possibility of your essay getting skim read.

You're probably right, that the predictability harms the essay in the long run. What should I edit out (put in?) to make things less predictable? I realize that the story of hardship and conquering may be trite, but I'm having trouble making things more unique.

Hmmm . . . I'm sort of torn about this essay. On the one hand, you are working with an analogy that is actually decently written, which is a bit creative and original. On the other hand, coping with the reality of your mother's illness should be a deeply emotional, personal topic that you can write on powerfully without reference to the beetle incident, which seems insignificant by comparison. Also, the analogy doesn't really work all that well. You draw a comparison between the beetle and your mother at various points, both suffering from fates they didn't deserve. But the analogy doesn't work so well on other points. For instance, how does one interpret your claim that "When I saw it had survived, I hit it a few more times to be sure it was dead," in symbolic terms without being vaguely horrified?

Thanks, I realize the last paragraph could be extraneous, and probably is given the negative response to it, so I removed it entirely. I might rewrite something, but I also think the last sentence of the second to last paragraph might be a suitable conclusion by itself.

As for the comment about the insignificance of the beetle compared to my mother, I thought about that for a while because from the start I wasn't sure what the beetle was going to symbolize. The beetle isn't as important as my mom, true, but I realize the beetle is more an appropriate analogy to myself in this story, the ability to take a blow (not cancer, but learning about a loved one's cancer) and roll with it. So to make that clearer, I added a short sentence in third-to-last paragraph.

I'm afraid I couldn't bring myself to delete the entireblock you struck, Liebe; I felt I'd be removing too much that wasn't said elsewhere. But I did cut some of it.

Without the last paragraph and some of the stuff Liebe identified, I've cut about 100 words from the essay, so it sits at 655 now.

I want to thank everyone for the time they put into this thread, and I feel bad posting another revision to be looked at.