Describe a circumstance, obstacle or conflict in your life and the skills and resources you used to resolve it. Did it change you? If so how?
Unexpectedly the mental trauma I received at the age of six from being sexually molested by my uncle one night, would lead me to gradually transform that adverse moment into my motivational resource as I would mask my emotional suffering from my family, and assume the responsibility not to hinder anyone with my problems for the rest of my life. When the separation between my parents came at the age fifteen, my mother who wanted no association with the commitments a family should provide, she would instantly disown me leading me to be homeless seeking shelter in unfamiliar homes, because my cheated heartbroken father was unable to support me emotionally and financially during my last years in high school.
Near the end of my sophomore year after being kicked out of my home along with my father, he would ask a favor from his friends, a Christian family, to take care of me. Since my father does not have documentation in the United States getting a job had always been a concern and obtaining a job were he could be close to me enough to support me through the situation was unattainable. To help his decision of entrusting me to the first family I assured him the situation would not affect me seriously and that the guilt over how I was caught in the middle of their relationship should not prevent him from taking any jobs. The Christian family treated me well withholding any assumptions as to why I was rejected by my mother, leaving me able to ask myself why I was tossed aside by her. I desperately wanted to have the mother-daughter relationship that the daughters of the Christian family took for granted, who knew nothing about the emotional pain a conversation led to with their mother. All I could do was find some comfort about being free of the miserableness my mother made me feel on whether I said something or not the fact that I thought different from her became an issue with her.
My mother's part of the family attempted to convince me it was my duty to ask my mother for forgiveness after defying her neglectful and hateful actions toward our family; my father would receive criticism from them leading him to take me to my mother only to have her and my godmother yell at me regarding how great of a mother she was and accuse me to be a horrible daughter to leave; during those early years, with my father. There was no reasoning capable of being made with them and by the end of sophomore year my father and I came to the decision to leave the town and pay our respects to the family that did us the favor of taking care of me.
Unsurprisingly my own family and the second family I stayed with for my whole junior year would treat me as a troubled impoverished miscreant, and my father after finally finding out about my sexual molestation would undermine my efforts seek success; he too joined the others who saw me as a destined failure. Regardless of what had occurred to me, I could not give in, fail, become who they saw me as no matter how frustrated or pained I was for instance, the people close to me deemed me guilty of acts such as punching my own mother in the face and leaving "on my own" not supporting my mother. Then in school, an assistant principal informed me how I was at higher risk of being a high school dropout due to being classified as homeless. It became essential that I developed a determination to defy every accusation every prediction by carrying on as the opposite person they thought and wished me to be. Living in someone's property was my opportunity to at least demonstrate to the people close, my father, and my mother to me that my conflict would not provoke any sort of incivility toward them. Yet the second family I lived with would challenge my resilience and strengthen my tolerance, as I was was tested everyday with taunts and ridicule aimed at my misfortune that placed me in their care. The rest of my years left in high school whether I choose to behave well and focus on school, did not matter to those families as I was inevitably bound to be like the ones they took care of before me and end up getting on getting a college degree. Every other week my father would visit and notice the daily mental afflictions I received from the family; he would later remark I should to disregard their statements before he left me, to a club as way to take his mind off the hardships he knew I faced daily.
Months later the family stopped their attacks after realizing that their attitudes would not make me reflect the same response to them, because they took care and I was in their debt the most I could do was offer them respect and forgive how they treated me. Before the start of my senior year, we would transition to a house my father bought with the aid of friends that loaned him money and unlike my previous arrangements where I slept in the dinning room and a block from the man who had been stabbed, the house was better than anything that had occurred to us the past 2 years. The new school unlike my previous schools, consisted of students came from middle class families that had a history of a college education while I did not. However, I walk through Dawson's high school hallways as a senior full of resiliency and determination to defy the fate others have placed in front of me, with students and teachers unaware of my past challenges; no longer identified by my uncontrollable obstacles rather how I overcame them.
Italy, you have a very informative essay. It really depicts your circumstances in life and how you overcame them. The problem, is that because you chose to present more than 1 obstacle, the essay became confused and hard to follow. The prompt clearly asks you to discuss only one obstacle or conflict. Not all of the above. So my advice to you is this; in order to shorten the essay and clarify it for content and prompt adherence, choose the one obstacle or conflict in your life that you feel will best be received or identified with by the reviewer. Then revise the essay to reflect only that event.
I don't really read much about the sexual abuse and its effects upon you in the essay so maybe you should not choose that topic. Most of the essay is about the way your parents rejected you. I think that would be a very nice topic to discuss further. You can explain why your parents saw you a certain way (since you did not really describe the circumstances behind it) and how you really felt when they treated you badly. Then you can explain how the Christian family affected you in a positive manner. Try to be more open about that episode and show us how you used their influence on you as an instrument of change in your life.
The essay has too much potential. What we need to do, is harness the best potential it has so that you can present a more concrete and heart tugging essay that will depict you as a survivor. The prompt wants you to tell the reviewer about how you react to immense stress and pressure in your life. Do you overcome and move on? Or do you crack and cave in? It is obvious in the essay that you are a person who overcomes, so try to make that more evident in your story.
Review your essay for highlight parts and omit anything that will simply prolong reading about the agony of your relationship with your family. You need to focus the essay on a singular topic in order to avoid reader boredom. The sooner you get to the point, the better your chances that the reviewer will actually finish reading and will consider the content of your essay in relation to your chances for admission.
