Other Things Worthy of Your Time
Emmanuel College Application
Essay
5/5/04
It’s an understatement to say that failure is life-altering, especially when it’s regarding matters of progress—what you’re going to do with your life, and how you plan to succeed. While my recent failure to be admitted to the primary institution I’d had my sights on for most of the last two years was definitely perception altering, it couldn’t be cited as having the biggest effect on me in all of my academic career. Actually, if I had to recall an experience that’s affected my academic performance, it would have to be the conditions of my education as a whole, and the way I approached it.
Whatever experiences and successes I’ve had in high school have always been interpreted to me as being at the highest level of my age potential. I’d always been told I was working hard enough and would be rewarded for it. The problem was, I was being judged by the standards of the people around me, and by the criteria for what their idea of ‘success’ was. I was being prepared for the niche in the country that they had reserved for me and themselves decided was the best. That’s the problem with small-town life in the middle of nowhere though. I wasn’t born to be naively hidden and accept ‘success’ in the ranks of insignificance.
For nearly a decade I learned what it was like to live potentially, rarely catching a glimpse of life as it was meant to be. Certainly the fact I was hidden in a backwater corner of the world in some small town meant life was easy, but that that was the last thing an ignorantly aspiring mind needed. I needed challenge. I needed preparation for the way the rest of the real world would be moving. And I needed someone who wouldn’t tell me who I was supposed to be, but make me realize for myself. That was the problem, the one I needed most had always been with me, regardless of where I was in the world: myself, or, more specifically, the person I was meant to be. Trapped in the confinements of small-town ignorance though, it wasn’t until a good part of my Junior Year had gone by that I attempted to raise my goals to the next level—a more appropriate one—and it wasn’t until this year and the actual move to a bigger school with higher standards that I realized how petty the experiences and successes to that point had been.
People need a certain comfort level in their daily lives to withstand any workload from pursuing a goal. After finding this comfort, sometimes the goal doesn’t seem as important. If you’re living life anyway, without yet realizing the fruit of your aims, there’s the assumption that there will still be life even without accomplishment. Sooner or later though, you realize you have to face the equivalent of things you might have been preparing for. A shame that it comes in the form of negative tragedy instead of productive adversity.
It takes wealth to live life. It takes a wealth of talent, and integrity, and just plain luck to follow plans and live out dreams. It takes money. Where is man without resource? What can man create without raw materials? There are plenty of failures and missed opportunities, excuses and realized mistakes, but fortune and blessing ends up being the governor of success in the world. Morals and ambition mean little. Ideas unrealized mean nothing. Dreams remain simple substitutions for already false happiness. What is an unsuccessful life worth anyway? Is there life without success?
It’s strange how we can find ourselves atop the world when we still have such a long way left to climb; we get so used to a life deprived of problems or hardship, and believe it’s the only way it could possibly be. We find ourselves caught up in the greatness of the moment and lose sight of the true greatness we were working towards. Worst of all, in this state of mind, we leave ourselves so much more vulnerable when it’s time to face adversity, when it’s time to fall.
Some say that you should learn from your mistakes; failure is just a stepping stone, and a minor obstacle on the large scale of things. When the time comes though, and it’s time to fall, it feels more like a mountain too great to scale. And the higher you set your standards, the harder it is to bare. Having set those standards though, I’m also the one to decide that even if there are things bigger and better than me, I’m still going to have to face them, and maybe even prove those first impressions of them wrong.
NOTES
This was essentially a mix of a letter I sent to Boston College, an essay I wrote for Exploring Diversity, and my current hopelessness.
After fixing some problems regarding a necessary class load through high school, I was accepted, the day after I graduated from Nokomis. I would go through high school in it's entirety, never fully sure that I'd be moving on.