Prompt 1: Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school - and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.
Please read and critique! Any comment is much appreciated and all critique is taken with a big smile! :D Thank you again!
"I thought you were an optimist." "You were wrong, weren't you? I'm a realist." "Ah, it's just another name for a quitter." "You can call me what you like. Don't you get it? We failed." "Failed. There are plenty of others willing to call you a failure. A fool. A loser. A hopeless souse. Don't you ever say it of yourself." "That's right, listen to Captain Haddock Tintin!" I gripped my mother's arm and scolded Tintin, the "Famed Boy Reporter [who] cheats gangland killer". Over a decade ago, while other six year olds listened to tales of cursed princesses and dashing princes, my mother read about days in 1931 Chicago when gangsters ruled the city, hunting for Red Rackham's Treasure, and blasting off to the moon. I told my mother I wished I could go on all those adventures with Tintin and always solve the mysteries. She told me to wish as much as I wanted, but to remember that Tintin faced obstacles on his adventures too. If I were ever to face them, I could not ever lose sight of chasing my dreams. That has stayed in my memories since the day I was told; each word as sharp as ever and echoed in my ears.
Suddenly I felt the words in my head jumble together, my feet slipped from under me, and my vision clouding as the warm shower water continued to pour over me. The next thing I knew I was slowly opening my eyes and I was on a hospital bed, my parents looking down at me, their faces creased with worry. A physician came in and ordered an MRI. The results came; I just went through my first grand mal seizure. She has epilepsy, the physician told my parents. I was ten when I first heard the word seizure uttered in front of me. The pills, the sleep studies, EEG tests came soon after that and continued throughout high school. I felt tired more often than I should during classes, scared that if anyone saw past my healthy façade, I would be seen as a failure. I battled those painful thoughts while the mantra that I was neither a loser nor a quitter lingered in my head. The mantra became woven into my dream of exploring the world and helping people realize that they should never give up on life.
My adventure might not lie specifically in visiting places like the Congo, Egypt, or even Syldavia. It lies throughout my life, the obstacles I face and where I go from there. The diagnosis of epilepsy? I realize it has given me a lifelong adventure that I will travel, the road of solving the mysteries that plague the human body. I will be on another adventure to chase my dreams and to tell others what Captain Haddock told Tintin and what my mother told me: If you care about something, you fight for it. You hit a wall, you push through it. There's something you need to know about failure. You can never let it defeat you.
If you care about something, you fight for it. You hit a wall, you push through it. There's something you need to know about failure. You can never let it defeat you.
SeniorPeach, while I like the hook that you created by using the story that your mother was reading to you, I feel that it is irrelevant to the heart of the story, which is your first experience with Gran Mal Seizure and how you had to recover from it. I believe that this is a world that is unique to you because as the person suffering from the seizures, you alone can experience that world. So talk about it. Describe how it feels for you to have a seizure, explain how you are treating it and how you are not letting it defeat you. Take us along on the ride towards the realization that you were not going to let this illness beat you because you were not going to let yourself be beaten by it. Then show us how your overcame it.
That is the portion of the essay that you should concentrate in. That is what led to the shaping of your dreams and aspirations. Don't spend too much time talking about the fictional character from the book, he did very little to shape your dreams, aspirations, and attitude in life. Those were shaped by your illness and how you dealt with it. So use that strong foundation for this essay. I am sure it will be one great paper once you are done with it :-)
