My Personal Restatement

When you’re applying to college, school guidance counselors tend to tell you two things: First, craft your application like it’s a story, and second, use that narrative to distinguish yourself. They ask you, what is your “thing?” What makes you special? They encourage you to narrow in on a particular quality, dimension of yourself, or a moment in time that defines who you are and the person you intend to become.

During my senior year of high school, with this advice in mind, I realized that if I wanted colleges to know the distilled essence of “me” it would require telling them a story I had never before shared. The countless hours of treatment and years of struggle that defined my childhood form the pixels of my self-portrait and I knew my application would be incomplete without zooming in on them.

Thus, writing my personal statement became an exercise in working out my life’s narrative. It became an iterative process of comparing my recollections of the truth to those of my family members and mapping these muddled memories onto the familiar framework of a hero’s journey.

At the same time, I had to learn how to package this narrative for an even broader audience. After years of never sharing my struggles with mental illness, even with my closest friends, I was offered the once-in-a-lifetime platform to share my experiences with 18,000 youth at WE Day Vancouver in October 2017. In my five minutes of fame, I hoped to join my story with a larger project of de-stigmatizing such illnesses and nurturing a culture of kindness.

My personal narrative congealed into the format of any good story. It was marked by a distinct beginning, middle, and end, concluding with a set of reflections and takeaways: I was the girl who persisted against all odds. I was the girl who had recovered. I was now using the antibodies of my recovery to try and help heal other’s wounds.

Slowly, without my realizing it, my narrative became rehearsed; it became static. The untamed idiosyncrasies of my previous seventeen years were contorted into a story’s arc. Before I even knew it, I was packaging my biggest “secret,” the very nexus of who I am, into an object of exchange.

For, in forming a personal narrative, an individual is forced to examine their subjectivity from the perspective of a third party. In this way, personal experience becomes an object under observation. This object is separated out from one’s life history, then sorted, analyzed, and extracted from, to produce the narrative in its final, most legible form. It takes on a specific language, interpretation, and emotional valence. Alas, when shared with others, particularly for strategic ends, the once inalienable narrative becomes increasingly distanced from the “self.” Essentially, it is rendered a commodity.

Seen from this angle, when we apply to college, we partake in a kind of commodity exchange. Our narrative is given in order to be repaid with something else: a personal story traded for an opportunity. In applying to schools, individuals must formulate and present a compelling personal narrative in exchange for their acceptance — for future social and economic capital. This narrative becomes our brand, rendering us both easily understandable and distinct. This precedes a process of valuation, where admissions officers put the “worth” of our narrative into direct comparison with the worth of the similarly commodified narratives of our peers.

While any notion of self-commodification makes me queasy, I am ultimately grateful for the exchange I took part in. The small bit of myself I packaged and gave to Harvard has granted me life-changing coursework, phenomenal friends, and an abundance of opportunities. Ultimately, I feel like my application to Harvard composed an accurate picture of who I am and I would not change a word of it.

Why then, in recent months, has this personal narrative felt more like a box than the item of exchange?

Sophomore fall brought to light new inconsistencies in and interpretations of my plotline that I am still sorting through, and still trying to extract lessons from. When I’m ready, maybe I’ll choose to share them. Or, maybe I’ll just pull them closer to me, reveling in their eccentricities, savoring them as a gift for no one else but me. Maybe they can be my little reminder that it is our lack of cohesion that gives us our three-dimensions, making us into humans not characters.

My personal statement was not fixed — it is still unfolding and very much in progress. My personal statement was but one chapter in a longer anthology. It is a signpost of how I thought about myself and my life at a specific moment in time.

There are dangers to sharing our most personal narratives but there is also immense value. All we can do is be patient, be kind, and offer up each day to one another as a blank page — an opportunity for re-statement.

Aysha L. J. Emmerson ’22, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Anthropology concentrator in Kirkland House.