I am not quite sure whether this essay is good and I would be glad to hear any suggestions you guys have. Thank you so much in advance!
The prompt for the essay is as follows: Describe a life experience in which you struggled or faced adversity. How did you respond to the situation? Where did you find support?
Breathing in the tissue-thin air of the Colorado Front Range, my lungs were growing heavier by the second. Both my legs felt like lumps of lead, heavy and useless, as I was trudging up the muddy single track towards the finish line. Mountain biking sucked and I sucked at mountain biking. Seriously, I have been doing this sport for more than three months. Even if this was my first race, it was expected that I would be able to pedal for more than a couple miles without too much difficulty.
Nobody ever told me cross-country biking would be the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I had half a mind to simply ride down the face of the mountain and quit racing forever.
For all the not yet mature perfectionists in the world, it proves to be the most humbling of experiences when they don't get something right the first time around. Nor is it easy on them the second time, third, fourth. Speaking from years of profound observation, perfectionists usually quit when their efforts aren't met with an immediate success. They seem to forget that behind each and every triumph, there are countless hours of hard work, resilience, and commitment. These words hold no meaning to them, because in regard to success, they are used to receiving without any obligation to give. What is more, it seems that a perfectionist's grand fatal flaw is deliberately seeking out endeavors they are good at in order to maintain an aura of brilliance about themselves. And how do I fit into all of this, you ask? Well, of course, I had always been the poster child of this unhealthy maniac in search of a fake image of personal excellence.
Seeing me as a little girl, you would not have been far from the truth if you were to say my mother had raised a quitter. Truly, whatever I picked up, I gave up on sooner than one could say 'hard work'. Whether it was my ballet classes, archery, flute, volleyball or my dream of one day becoming a famous author, I eventually let all of them go, regarding them too difficult and thankless to bother with. Instead, I chose to pursue the things that came easy to me, like becoming the next Joan Jett, if Joan Jett sang and played guitar in a Christian choir. To excel in the choir did not necessarily require any extra effort on my part, since I have always been good at singing, and thus this activity provided no room for failure. And that precisely was the root of all my toxic perfectionism. My mind rejected failure, deemed it unacceptable. I was dead set on living my life without it, because I was the girl who never lost.
Mountain biking, however, taught me the importance of failure as well as deferring gratification. My first bike race was indeed quite unsuccessful, and so were all the other races yet to come. Every single second of the incessant ascending accompanied by wheezing and nausea felt like I had been given an early glimpse of what it felt like to take a stroll through hell. I can't even count the amount of falls I took, rocks and cacti scarring my limbs. And yet I don't regret a single waking moment of it all. I may have failed hundreds upon hundreds of times in those tiny falls. But I never failed completely, for I have never given up, considering all those tiny falls an invaluable lesson into the future. What I learned from mountain biking is that failure does not automatically equal a loss. Quite contrary, from every loss, you learn something new. You grow as a person, if you have the courage to look failure in the eye and continue regardless of her discouraging, contemptuous stares.
I had half a mind to simply ride down the face of the mountain and quit racing forever. And yet something stopped me dead in my tracks. Maybe that was it. The reason why I never seemed to be good at anything I tried was because I didn't allow myself the time to learn it properly in the first place. I always ran away from everything with the potential risk of failure attached to it. But without failure, I could never possibly develop and grow. I enclosed myself in a bubble of stagnation, never becoming more than just a little girl who had always too scared to live.
So I got on my bike, started pedaling as hard as I could, fell off, and got back on again smiling, for I knew that by deciding to finish the race, I finally left that scared little girl behind.
The prompt for the essay is as follows: Describe a life experience in which you struggled or faced adversity. How did you respond to the situation? Where did you find support?
Breathing in the tissue-thin air of the Colorado Front Range, my lungs were growing heavier by the second. Both my legs felt like lumps of lead, heavy and useless, as I was trudging up the muddy single track towards the finish line. Mountain biking sucked and I sucked at mountain biking. Seriously, I have been doing this sport for more than three months. Even if this was my first race, it was expected that I would be able to pedal for more than a couple miles without too much difficulty.
Nobody ever told me cross-country biking would be the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I had half a mind to simply ride down the face of the mountain and quit racing forever.
For all the not yet mature perfectionists in the world, it proves to be the most humbling of experiences when they don't get something right the first time around. Nor is it easy on them the second time, third, fourth. Speaking from years of profound observation, perfectionists usually quit when their efforts aren't met with an immediate success. They seem to forget that behind each and every triumph, there are countless hours of hard work, resilience, and commitment. These words hold no meaning to them, because in regard to success, they are used to receiving without any obligation to give. What is more, it seems that a perfectionist's grand fatal flaw is deliberately seeking out endeavors they are good at in order to maintain an aura of brilliance about themselves. And how do I fit into all of this, you ask? Well, of course, I had always been the poster child of this unhealthy maniac in search of a fake image of personal excellence.
Seeing me as a little girl, you would not have been far from the truth if you were to say my mother had raised a quitter. Truly, whatever I picked up, I gave up on sooner than one could say 'hard work'. Whether it was my ballet classes, archery, flute, volleyball or my dream of one day becoming a famous author, I eventually let all of them go, regarding them too difficult and thankless to bother with. Instead, I chose to pursue the things that came easy to me, like becoming the next Joan Jett, if Joan Jett sang and played guitar in a Christian choir. To excel in the choir did not necessarily require any extra effort on my part, since I have always been good at singing, and thus this activity provided no room for failure. And that precisely was the root of all my toxic perfectionism. My mind rejected failure, deemed it unacceptable. I was dead set on living my life without it, because I was the girl who never lost.
Mountain biking, however, taught me the importance of failure as well as deferring gratification. My first bike race was indeed quite unsuccessful, and so were all the other races yet to come. Every single second of the incessant ascending accompanied by wheezing and nausea felt like I had been given an early glimpse of what it felt like to take a stroll through hell. I can't even count the amount of falls I took, rocks and cacti scarring my limbs. And yet I don't regret a single waking moment of it all. I may have failed hundreds upon hundreds of times in those tiny falls. But I never failed completely, for I have never given up, considering all those tiny falls an invaluable lesson into the future. What I learned from mountain biking is that failure does not automatically equal a loss. Quite contrary, from every loss, you learn something new. You grow as a person, if you have the courage to look failure in the eye and continue regardless of her discouraging, contemptuous stares.
I had half a mind to simply ride down the face of the mountain and quit racing forever. And yet something stopped me dead in my tracks. Maybe that was it. The reason why I never seemed to be good at anything I tried was because I didn't allow myself the time to learn it properly in the first place. I always ran away from everything with the potential risk of failure attached to it. But without failure, I could never possibly develop and grow. I enclosed myself in a bubble of stagnation, never becoming more than just a little girl who had always too scared to live.
So I got on my bike, started pedaling as hard as I could, fell off, and got back on again smiling, for I knew that by deciding to finish the race, I finally left that scared little girl behind.