This essay is extremely personal. I think I can cut my intro down. Any thoughts? How about the rest of it?? In my conclusion, I begin talking about volunteering. Should I take this out?? I dont want to start talking about it because I could go on for a page just talking about volunteering. Does it sound like Im just starting to talk about something totally different, or should I leave it in? ANY ADVICE WOULD BE HELPFUL!! THANKS SO MUCH!!
PROMPT: Choose an issue of importance to you-the issue could be personal, school related, local, political, or international in scope-and write an essay in which you explain the significance of that issue to yourself, your family, your community, or your generation.
Phases
This might sound crazy. I often wonder what it would be like to taste the color blue or what color the car horn would produce. Imagine looking at the letters on this page of plain white paper and seeing a multitude of different colors creating a work of art right before your eyes. These are the ideas expressed in a book I read more than five years ago called A Mango-Shaped Space. It is a book about Mia, a girl who has a disorder (a gift in my eyes) called synesthesia, which allows her to view the world in colors unlike anyone else. Her senses intermingle to produce sounds that she interprets as being colorful geometric shapes and numbers and letters that glow every color on the visible light spectrum. While I know I will never get the opportunity to experience the fantastical world as Mia does, I can say that I always try my hardest to view the world through other people's perspectives and learn from their experiences. Maybe this is the reason I remember the scenes in the book like I read it yesterday. I learned a very important life lesson from a fiction book I bought from a middle school book fair.
My life is separated into two distinct phases. The first segment began when I was born and lasted until I was ten. My dad is bipolar, but he did not discover that he had this menacing disorder until I was ten. He was leading a lifestyle that was both unhealthy for himself and his family. I can remember spending days in my parents' California king bed staring at the swirls of light and dark brown wood on the headboard intertwining to create whimsical images. My parents were on the verge of divorce. My mind was screaming, "What is happening, why our family?" I know it is a cliché to ask "Why me?", but at this age, that is all I could think of. I felt like I was frozen. Everything around me was spinning 200 miles an hour, and I could not find the red "easy" button like on the Staples commercials to make it stop. He was in and out of hospitals. My mom was in and out of doctors' offices trying to describe his erratic behavior in hopes of finding that one doctor that could correctly diagnose him. I was in and out of therapy playing with toy horses in sand boxes with the therapist, activities which still make no sense in my mind. I felt helpless. Finally, my mom, being the great researcher that she is, came across an article on bipolar disorder.
From that point on, my life, slowly but surely, became normal. I was no longer staring at headboards or going to therapists. I began to laugh again. My parents did too. We began to pick up the pieces and start our lives fresh. The second phase of my life is still in progress, but I have done so much already. I have gotten lost in a London subway, made it to the top of the Eiffel Tower, sledded down a 14,000 foot mountain in Switzerland, cried at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, zip lined in Costa Rica, and learned, while visiting Pearl Harbor, of the harrowing stories of the men who lost their lives. All of this, and I am only 18. While everything was seemingly ideal, I never forgot my first phase. I still did not quite understand why my dad put us through the tornado of uncertainty. That insecurity lasted until I read A Mango Shaped Space and learned the gem of striving to value other people's outlooks through Mia's struggle to fit in among peers who were skeptical of her "disorder." I launched an exploration into my dad's battle with bipolar disorder in those anguishing years. He told me stories of longing to be home with his family but physically and psychologically unable to be so. I began to understand that he had no control over his behavior as a result of a chemical imbalance in his brain. The heartache he must have gone through astounds me to this day, as I see and hear the unconditional love he feels for me with every twinkle in his eye when he describes an idea for a new art project he is working on and every word he speaks with such exuberance.
People tend to want to stick to the "status quo", in which everyone lives his or her individual life apart from the rest of the world's influence. Through my whirlwind of a childhood culminating in the diagnosis of my father by my mother (of all people) and reading A Mango Shaped Space, I have come to value other people's life experiences and perspectives. When people ask me if I would want to change anything that has happened in my life, I reply, "Not at all." I would have a narrower outlook of our world if I had not been faced with such difficulties. Just as Mia's senses intermingle, my previously conceived views and those of others fuse to create a perspective that enables me to be more accepting of our world as it is.
PROMPT: Choose an issue of importance to you-the issue could be personal, school related, local, political, or international in scope-and write an essay in which you explain the significance of that issue to yourself, your family, your community, or your generation.
Phases
This might sound crazy. I often wonder what it would be like to taste the color blue or what color the car horn would produce. Imagine looking at the letters on this page of plain white paper and seeing a multitude of different colors creating a work of art right before your eyes. These are the ideas expressed in a book I read more than five years ago called A Mango-Shaped Space. It is a book about Mia, a girl who has a disorder (a gift in my eyes) called synesthesia, which allows her to view the world in colors unlike anyone else. Her senses intermingle to produce sounds that she interprets as being colorful geometric shapes and numbers and letters that glow every color on the visible light spectrum. While I know I will never get the opportunity to experience the fantastical world as Mia does, I can say that I always try my hardest to view the world through other people's perspectives and learn from their experiences. Maybe this is the reason I remember the scenes in the book like I read it yesterday. I learned a very important life lesson from a fiction book I bought from a middle school book fair.
My life is separated into two distinct phases. The first segment began when I was born and lasted until I was ten. My dad is bipolar, but he did not discover that he had this menacing disorder until I was ten. He was leading a lifestyle that was both unhealthy for himself and his family. I can remember spending days in my parents' California king bed staring at the swirls of light and dark brown wood on the headboard intertwining to create whimsical images. My parents were on the verge of divorce. My mind was screaming, "What is happening, why our family?" I know it is a cliché to ask "Why me?", but at this age, that is all I could think of. I felt like I was frozen. Everything around me was spinning 200 miles an hour, and I could not find the red "easy" button like on the Staples commercials to make it stop. He was in and out of hospitals. My mom was in and out of doctors' offices trying to describe his erratic behavior in hopes of finding that one doctor that could correctly diagnose him. I was in and out of therapy playing with toy horses in sand boxes with the therapist, activities which still make no sense in my mind. I felt helpless. Finally, my mom, being the great researcher that she is, came across an article on bipolar disorder.
From that point on, my life, slowly but surely, became normal. I was no longer staring at headboards or going to therapists. I began to laugh again. My parents did too. We began to pick up the pieces and start our lives fresh. The second phase of my life is still in progress, but I have done so much already. I have gotten lost in a London subway, made it to the top of the Eiffel Tower, sledded down a 14,000 foot mountain in Switzerland, cried at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, zip lined in Costa Rica, and learned, while visiting Pearl Harbor, of the harrowing stories of the men who lost their lives. All of this, and I am only 18. While everything was seemingly ideal, I never forgot my first phase. I still did not quite understand why my dad put us through the tornado of uncertainty. That insecurity lasted until I read A Mango Shaped Space and learned the gem of striving to value other people's outlooks through Mia's struggle to fit in among peers who were skeptical of her "disorder." I launched an exploration into my dad's battle with bipolar disorder in those anguishing years. He told me stories of longing to be home with his family but physically and psychologically unable to be so. I began to understand that he had no control over his behavior as a result of a chemical imbalance in his brain. The heartache he must have gone through astounds me to this day, as I see and hear the unconditional love he feels for me with every twinkle in his eye when he describes an idea for a new art project he is working on and every word he speaks with such exuberance.
People tend to want to stick to the "status quo", in which everyone lives his or her individual life apart from the rest of the world's influence. Through my whirlwind of a childhood culminating in the diagnosis of my father by my mother (of all people) and reading A Mango Shaped Space, I have come to value other people's life experiences and perspectives. When people ask me if I would want to change anything that has happened in my life, I reply, "Not at all." I would have a narrower outlook of our world if I had not been faced with such difficulties. Just as Mia's senses intermingle, my previously conceived views and those of others fuse to create a perspective that enables me to be more accepting of our world as it is.