Shift your perspective from "I'm gonna die!" to "End of life" insight Probably the last thing on your mind while writing your college essay is your end-of-life perspective. Now, it's also true that, while working on your college applications, you might catch yourself saying things like: "I am gonna DIE from this stress!" or "I will DIE if I don't get into XYZ school!" But actually: you won't die. You are being figurative. (And here's some comic relief for you. Go laugh.) However, at the very moment you swear, "This workload is killing me" (no, no it isn't), many people actually are dying. And the dying frequently say painfully honest, instructive things. We're going to mix it up a bit. Take a break from the pressure and anxiety of the application process. Consider instead the refreshing and challenging vantage dying people can offer-- all of us. End-of-life influence on your essay Your college essay, if it's to be anything other than a hurdle and obligation, is an opportunity to get honest in that same way. This 650-word spotlight on you gives you unique opportunity to look closely at your life, let go of what isn't working (on the page and off), and to say something fresh. Something that at your end-of-life self might give a high-five. Kerry Egan, essayists and end-of-life chaplain, culls some brilliant advice from the dying here. It's advice in the form of their wistfulness, of their regret. Most wish they could have listened to their inner impulses and just loved themselves, their bodies. For whatever those bodies were, for all that those bodies did. Read their words, and soak in them. A love like that Can your personal essay be an act of rebellious love? Why not? What if you adopt this end-of-life perspective, and love yourself, truly? Your one and only body, the service it does for you and others? Can you even include in that love whatever is wrong with you, or whatever other people say is wrong with you, and Continue Reading …
love
Coming from Love
Love was a great teacher for me this year. Love insisted on many a mini-essay in her over-used, under-understood name. Here is what I learned. My sister had her first baby this November, and I was with her for the 26-hours of unrelenting labor. If you think writing your college essay is hard, try delivering an 8lb+ baby without pain medications. Labor is messy, ancient, and happens on its own inexplicable timing. No human arrives but by some version of this route. All of our mothers, somehow, bore it-- whether assisted or unassisted. This is you and me I am talking about, and our exodus from the mysterious biological soup women's bodies somehow brew. When my sister's baby came out, she was unnamed, and screaming. She already had wordless opinions about her new circumstances and the trial of leaving my sister's body in order to have her own body, her own existence, her own self. I felt bonding hormones helplessly rush through my bloodstream in response to the newborn's fresh cries and reddened womb-dusted skin. The hormones came in surges of Jedi-style loving protectorship which make you think, true or not, you can stall barreling trucks in their tracks, hold up collapsing buildings, and bear to change runny diapers at 3AM--while you fend off attacking tigers with your middle finger. My niece Nora is a little over a month old now. She spends much of the day asleep, re-assuming the shape of the womb, preferably against your chest. She gives you the most earnest stare while you whack her harder than you'd think to get her to burp, and then she adds in a little gas-bubbly fart as a P.S., a digestive afterthought. This girl blasted open my heart the way water spews from an open hydrant. I mean I was down on my knees because of the magnitude of my love for her; there was nowhere even to put this love, it was unwieldy, the size of the universe, it had to be compressed into baby-gentle kisses. Ever loved like that? This kind of love is humbling Continue Reading …
A Writer’s Inheritance: Fake it, then make it
Free-write Faker I follow my own rules for creativity when I’m with my students. When we free write, the law of the land is don’t stop writing no matter what. Because I am used to this physical commitment, rarely does nothing come out. So when my mind careened into a non-verbal ditch at an inopportune moment, in order to stay with the game, I kept on by fake writing. Not faking writing, but writing fake words. Pen still in motion. Rule not broken. Continue Reading …
College Essay Boot Camp: Don’t Give Your Mind a Cramp!
College Essay Boot Camp is all the rage right now: go ahead, Google it. "Boot camp" prevalence implies that your admissions essay, like world domination, is not going to happen if you don't get all militaristic about it. But get this: Essay Intensive brings you a nouveau college essay boot camp model: with us, you figure out ways to respect and maximize what you've already got going on so intensely that you wind up with a product (an essay!) only love could have made. Make love, they say after all, not war. We buy that trade-off. Because the following is not where you thought you'd turn for essay-writing, is it? Continue Reading …