Finding a first topic to write about is difficult. I have many ideas for a first topic, but this is my first impression. My make or break (maybe not that dramatic). This decision is important. People will read this for first time and have so many ideas of the author.

I have to make it great.

Except, I have no idea how to make it great. I struggled with the same issue when writing a college essay. I had ideas, funny ones, emotional ones and eye-catching ones. I wrote three different essays for college. I only submitted one.

My first two essays were good. That was it, just good. Teachers and counselors drill into students' heads that it needs to be great. No college just wants a good essay. They want to know all about you in this tiny paragraph, but they want it to be written eloquently. They want emotion, but not too much, because that could make the reader uncomfortable.

They want a neatly packed person who can fit into a small essay and who writes like an award-winning author. I am none of those. I struggled with picking a topic, because I had many ideas. Ideas that could be weird and a bit abnormal.

My first attempt was the typical emotional essay. I wrote about how I started my junior year with chronic pain and how I struggled with being diagnosed and all the other sad, emotional, "pity me" stuff. I hated that essay. My teachers loved it. It was easy to identify with, easy to understand, no hard-pressing emotions and topics. Just a sad girl who wished she could be better.

I am not that girl. I presented myself that way because I thought that’s what they wanted. They wanted to read a well written story with a happy ending. My happy ending was telling them that I was okay with being sick, because could be worse. I am okay with it, because I do truly believe that it could be worse, but how sick is it that I decided to condense a story of self discovery into 500 words.

I told my teachers and parents and anyone who asked that I was submitting that one. I really believed I would. I only wrote the other ones because my English class was just starting on theirs and I was already done.

The title of the next essay was, “Question: How Do I Convince Aliens To Take Me From Earth?” The jolly, funny essay about how I was lazy and too tired to go school. Maybe if aliens took me, they would study my sleep schedule instead of cutting me up and taking a peek.

It was vetoed by a friend of mine. It was too casual. No college would take me seriously if I talked about aliens and how I just wanted an extra hour of sleep. Back to the first essay, it seemed.

I wrote my last essay while I was angry. I had spent another hour looking over my first, trying to put more of me in the essay, but I couldn’t find a way to fit myself in a tiny box. I wrote the essay angrily, feeling annoyed that I had to pretend to be a person who could simply tell one's life story and have that be their defining factor.

I called the essay, “Condense Me.” I was upset and disheartened by the idea that I had to condense myself to fit standards. So I didn’t. I wrote about how I hated the idea of personal statements because a person can’t know who I truly am with 500 words.