Waiting for a Future

Hello Everyone,
With application season behind us and the waiting and hearing well on its way, I decided I would post a part of my college essay in celebration. Hoping all of you are enjoying your 2014 and have bright things ahead of you this year! A sampling of my Common App essay is below :)

Have you ever felt words pulse through your veins, alongside your blood?  I have.  Every day.  Swirling through my arteries, pumping through my long limbs.  I am made of them.  I am a child of prose.  And so are the people I love most in the world.

Children are microcosms of their cultures.  Mine was one in which rhetoric was king.  My father, a lawyer, loves to play with words.  He uses words like “penultimate” in daily conversation; this was the white noise that I was raised on.  My mother, a fiction writer, also instilled an early passion for language.  One of the earliest boundaries I learned as a child was to leave my mother be in the stolen hours she managed to find to work on her chapter.

Both of my parents relish other people’s stories too, not just their own—we are a family of story tellers and readers. Raised in this framework, writing became as natural to me as walking.  It was instinct, like a newborn infant grabbing its’ mother’s finger.  Before I even learned the alphabet, I constantly told the stories that were running through my head.  The family lore holds that I told my first story just past my second birthday.  It concerned a wolf and a duck; the latter was eaten.  This was the extent of his saga, but it was the beginning of mine.  I stumbled over words too big for me, because they weren’t my words: they were an inherited treasure trove, my parents’ most lasting gift.  Words are the lens through which I have always understood the world.

Even so, it was not until I attended the California Summer School for the Arts as a Creative Writing student that I learned how deeply tied I am to the written word.  It was a big step: a month on the campus of CalArts in Valencia, studying writing all day, every day. My roommates and I called our dorm room Writeous, a not-so-clever pun of which we were very proud.  I have never excelled at sports, and teen pop culture sometimes seems foreign to me.  I love theater, but the people drawn to it often make me feel overly cerebral, unfashionably introspective.  But with the writing students, I didn’t have to explain myself anymore.  I recognized the  irony of  people who love words more than anything else in the world but do not need them to express their feelings to one another.  I was home.  

I found my place in the classrooms of CalArts, in the ninety degree heat of July as I created prose that was richer than  I ever  thought possible.  I discovered who I am there.  I am a child of prose, and I am proud of the inkstains on my skin.