#collegge

Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement? 

You can trace mental illness through my family tree like a streak of gold through a Rocky Mountain mine. We’ve got all the cliches: tortured writers, hermits, opiate addicts, and the ever-present obsessive compulsive who was invariably the butt of many a Monk jest. For many years, that’s all those things were to me. A distant problem that “other people” had. Something we collectively laughed at when examining family histories, like ha-ha, wasn’t great-great-grandma Mary so funny? She heard voices tell her that her broomsticks were possessed by the devil. Until, in the usual way of things, it wasn’t. Sophomore year, under a combination of stresses both real and invented, I stopped eating. That’s a simple way of putting a very complicated thing, but I found that school was so much easier when I was starving. For two years, the hunger sharpened my brain and ate away at my muscle, until my ravaged body wouldn’t even let me sleep for fear of my heartbeat slowing to a stop. All, the while I spend [yes, this is a typo. I didn’t proofread my essays before I submitted them.] my days taking tests and writing essays, maintaining my straight A’s like nothing ever could be wrong. When I transitioned into recovery at the start of my Senior year, my grades suffered. It was like a constant buzzing in my ears, every moment that my stomach was full. And that’s when school took the backseat. Maybe I’m not supposed to say that, in a college essay. I’m probably supposed to tell you that school comes before everything, always. But the truth is that it doesn’t; this year, I’ve dropped out of the vast majority of my extracurricular activities. I’ve chosen Honors Statistics over Honors Calculus, a study hall where I can eat my morning snack in peace over Physics. At the moment, every bite is excruciating, a reminder of the brokenness of my brain. But this is not forever, because I am taking those bites. With a mix of mood stabilizers and good ol’ fashioned cognitive-behavioral therapy, I am getting better.

Read My First Essay Here

Yeah.