Harvard Supplement Essay.Topic of your choice.Feedback would be appreciated.This is exactly 702 words including the title.
"An identity sculpted by language, infused with words, and bathed in beauty."
People often speak of a cause, what Kierkegaard would call a "defining commitment". They recount stories of personal discovery and growth, stories filled with people or things, often even both, that have made them who they are. I am a firm believer in the existentialist concept of self creation, the power to build oneself as a human being, but also as an intellectual and professional capacity. Subsequently, I believe that passion and inspiration must be sought for, that they are not gifts bestowed upon one at birth.
I think I am confident to say that my process of creating myself began, albeit without at first my conscious awareness, when I picked up a book for the first time. As any child who attends school, to read was an obligation, necessary in a learning environment. Prior to first grade, I had learned to write and read elementary texts, but I had never been exposed to the delight and sheer vastness that I later discovered language to be.
Twain's "Tom Sawyer" was our first assigned reading at the beginning of third grade and I dove into its narrative without expectations or preconceptions. It was simply an assignment as any other. What I found inside this adventurer's story was, for I was still a child in all ways imaginable, an entirely new world. It was as if a window had opened that not only allowed me to explore the garden of literature, but whose uniqueness rested in the power it had to bring down walls in my mind thus connecting parts of my consciousness, of my self, many of which I never knew I had. Of course then, I was not capable of the elaborate analysis I am now. All I could say with utter conviction was that I wanted more. To know is to crave and that much has been clear since Eve dared eat the apple.
All through elementary and then secondary school I read every book I could get my hands on, juggling, after I acquired a certain proficiency in English, literature in both tongues. For a quiet child and later an introverted adolescent who preferred the intimacy of her own mind to the tempestuous dynamic of social life, words became my most trusted companions. I loved,and I still do, their capacity to express emotions I had experienced. I stood in a mixture of wonder and awe at the descriptions of sentiments unknown to me.I think I can safely say that language, in all its forms, has made me treasure life in that it has provided me with an incentive to keep on living. In it, I have found depicted a wide specter of all things human which has made me long to feel and to be.
"Words are a narcotic", Kafka says. This rings especially true for me, as I have never been particularly adventurous or rebellious. The only revolutions I have been able to conduct have been the ones inside my mind. Words,or as some philosophers would argue, thoughts and ideas themselves, have been my weapons, my leisure, a mode of escapism, bricks with which to create, yet simultaneously, tools with which to destroy. Language is essential to my emotional and intellectual sanity, and without constant exposure to it or without my personal output of words, I would not be able to recognize myself. I am addicted to words because the beauty they contain intoxicates me, and the power they possess to change, overthrow, and create worlds fascinates me on an entirely more conscious level.
This should explain, lastly, the commitment I have made to words, a personal vow to use, write, and analyze language. This is a promise to revel in all its glory and confusion, both in equal measure.In simple terms,this is the outline of my self-creation, the frame of my self realization. My future seems inconceivable without the practice of language in one form or other, because it is genuinely what I can do best. Amidst words I feel at home while constantly experiencing the thrill of discovery, which is as accurate a description of "the best of both worlds" as I can think of.
