Prompt: Describe a circumstance, obstacle or conflict in your life, and the skills and resources you used to resolve it. Did it change you? If so, how?
My main goal of my essay is to help explain my poor GPA due to low grades in my freshman year. Please help critique!
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When the news of my parent's separation came to me at the age of 14, i can say I was less than surprised. After years of fighting on a daily basis, my parents would finally make peace of each other. I was glad I would be able to enter high school without the emotional burden of family conflicts pressuring me. On the contrary, as the divorce process just began, my father revealed his 8 month old relationship with his new up and coming wife. Despite being disgusted by my father's open adultery, I felt that I should not burden my friends or family with my emotional baggage and began to enclose myself. My mother proved to be obsessed with revenge once discovering my father's infidelity during their marriage. She sought to take the majority of his paycheck through child support and alimony but hiring a lawyer proved to be extremely expensive. With my sister off at college, I became the perfect bargaining chip for my mother. In order to get my father to agree to her wishes on the divorce decree, she would mistreat me to show my father what she could do to me if he didn't agree. However, this quickly proved to be ineffective. I represented my father's old life, his burden, and his stress while his new wife represented his dreams and his happiness. Understandably, he began to neglect his duties and turned a blind eye to my suffering. As a result, my mother became even more extreme. Out of a fit of anger, I would be kicked out of the house in the middle of the night. My mother's goal was to disrupt my father's new, peaceful life as she believed he would be forced to drive to my house to pick me up in the middle of the night. Instead, I would be stuck in the freezing cold the entire night. I can now testify that Texas winters are freezing, and I thought this was the South!
Furious, wronged, tired and cold, I could do nothing. My sister couldn't help me from Austin and I had no friends. I could not do anything except to sit on my doorstep, until my mother left for work in the morning. Tired out, I snuck in through the back door and went to sleep. Thus began the pattern for the next few weeks of my life. Every afternoon, I would leave the house before my mother came home and would sit on the doorstep and every morning I would go into sleep. Of course, while all this was happening, I still had school, not that I attended. Sleeping and escaping reality became my number one priority. Once I woke up, I would be forced face my father's neglect, my mother's emotional abuse, and the loneliness of the outdoors. At the age of 14, school became my absolute last priority. I quickly dropped from a straight A student to a 28-day truant who was failing every single subject.
My mother was notified by the courts that I would need to have a hearing on my truancy case. and was enraged to find out that I had been skipping school. The verbal abuse became ten folds worse, shattering my desire to achieve my dreams, my self confidence, and my will to live. She told me I was trash and should have been aborted. Rather than the meaning of the words getting to me, I was devastated that even my mother would think so lowly of me. I was worth nothing.
My mother hated me. My father hated me. I had no friends. Who was I going to live for? No one.
I felt I no longer had obligations to anyone...which was exactly what motivated me. I had no one to blame for my troubles. I didn't need to feel bad for my mother or guilty for my father; they had chosen to abandon me and that was their own choice. I had a new found resolution to live for myself, I would work for myself and myself only. My feelings couldn't be hurt by my mother's sharp words or my father's negligence as they were harmless to me as long as I loved myself. I spent my entire life thus far trying to please others, and live up to their standards. But with my new found freedom, I gained the will to work hards towards what I wanted.
The absolute destruction of my life developed into a desire to succeed. Stronger than ever, I work towards my dream to study to be an accountant. As I close the door on my high school journey, I look forward to contributing my unique passion for discovery at the University of Texas. As a child, the tremendous appeal of please others guided my life, but after finding my own way, I am now undaunted by any obstacles.
Veronica, you need to make the essay less about your parents and more about the conflict that you faced because of their divorce. Listen, I can understand why you would want to tell the complete story of the breakup in an effort to lay blame for your grades. But the truth is, you have no one to blame for your grades other than yourself. You were the one that allowed your personal life to disrupt your academic life because you felt lost and had no guidance. However, the break up of your family is not the problem in your essay. The problem is that you lost hope and gave up on yourself. That is the real conflict that you faced and that is what you should spend more than half the space on the page on.
It will be better if you reduce the tale of how your parent's differences escalated. It takes up too much space and removes the focus of the essay from you. Always remember that regardless of the topic that is being discussed, you have to be the star of the essay, no one else. Instead of describing their emotions, describe how this affected you. Explain why you decided to stop attending school. How did it relate to the sense of loss that you felt? What did you do when you were not in school? What do you think is the real reason behind your self destruction at that point?
The last two paragraphs of your essay definitely helped the response get back on track. I think that it should work well with the revised essay once you get it done. Again, the last two paragraphs will be subject to further analysis and revision depending upon how you develop the content of your revised essay. I look forward to reading the changes that you will be applying :-)
