I read applications, and I write essays for them. Whether it is for scholarships, acceptance, or employment, I find that most of the time I see some form of "What have you gone through to get here?" or "Tell of a time you overcame adversity to get to where you are today."
Each time I read this, I find myself scratching my head. I am lucky to have bumps in the road. Bumps that I can consider minor in the long run. These bumps are not clear cut as adversity, as everyone has their own struggles, but your attitude is what makes the hard times seem small... or seem crushing. I know I have struggles, but I do not like to think of them as some kind of weight dragging me down. But when writing about my experiences, why do I feel like I have to have the best story of hard times?
When people asked why I wanted to be a doctor, I felt like I needed a sob story. Some kind of illness when younger or hard times in the hospital with family members to tell people about - that it inspired me to do something with my life, like I had a sudden realization of who I wanted to be. Even if I did have a sad story, why does that have to be my "adversity"? My troubles are not clear enough to put into one singular instance of "this was hard, and this is what I did." What if how I overcame adversity was by simply enduring.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines this feeling in the word "lachesism: (n) the desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other."
It is the desire to have a story. I want an experience to slap on paper and be exactly what I want it to be. I don't want to shrug my shoulders and wonder what makes me special, or any other different from the thousands of other applicants. I am lucky to feel like my troubles are miniscule compared to the vast expanse of bad things that happen to people. As one of my bestfriends says, "From the day you're born till the day you ride in a hearse, there's nothing so bad that couldn't be worse."
