Personal Essay Draft

Reaching deep down into my lungs for a few more breaths, I leaned down to touch the end line and made the turn for home. Red faced and gasping for breath, I crossed the final end line and came to a grateful stop; leaning against the wall for a brief moment before pacing the sideline with my hands over my head, trying hard to appear nonchalant and slightly less winded than I felt. I had been at school since my zero-hour French class at 7am and it was now nearing 7pm, all I wanted to do was go home and collapse, but instead there were more suicides to run. We all stepped back to the line and waited for the whistle, poised to run yet again, another opportunity to prove ourselves…it was the first basketball practice of my senior season.
I played my first game of organized basketball in 4th grade, and our team was so bad that it was comical. This comedy was only compounded by the fact that every parent in attendance were cheering for our every move as if we had just won the Super Bowl, and I highly doubt that most of the girls even remember the game at all. In fact, most everyone’s biggest concern was the uniforms we wore—borrowed from our school’s middle school girls’ team, and therefore much too large on most of us—several girls spent the whole game rolling and unrolling their shorts so that they would look just right in case the ball ever happened to actually get passed to them. The final score was lopsidedly in favor of the other team, but no one other than me seemed to care much. I pouted afterwards, mad that the game hadn’t followed the vision in my head,
However, in spite of my inauspicious beginnings, that game was the start of my athletic “career”. I settled into a rhythm of continuous schoolwork and sports, each offering multiple opportunities for my stubbornness and perfectionism to show through. Living in a small town on a tiny island--Lopez Island School District had a population of around 250 students K-12—there wasn’t a huge amount of competition in whatever goals you chose to pursue, whether they were in school, sports, art, or music. From grades 6-12, each year had four seasons in my eyes: volleyball season, basketball season, the end of the school year, and summer.
Fiercely competitive and stubborn, and growing up with parents who pushed me harder and harder to reach expectations that sometimes seemed unattainable, I grew into a perfectionist to the extreme. In some instances, I was literally so internally petrified of the possibility of not reaching the goals in my head that I would simply not be able to complete an assignment; in my mind, not finishing a paper at all was better than finishing it and not doing as well as I had hoped. These unrealistic expectations and twisted logic were as difficult for me to rationalize in my own mind as they were to explain to others, but I was lucky to have attended a small school where I was able to communicate closely with my teachers as they tried to understand what I was going through.
This internal learning process came to a head after I graduated from high school and made the decision to move halfway across the country and come to Kalamazoo College. A small community, quite similar in many ways to my hometown, Kalamazoo seemed to me to be the perfect place to continue my education, both personally and scholastically. Thrown into a world filled with hundreds of other perfectionists and procrastinators, surrounded by people who had faced many of the same problems that I had, coming to Kalamazoo eventually helped me work to solve the problems I faced, though differently than I had originally anticipated. My process of learning and change of environment, coupled with the realization that I was not alone in my seemingly crazy mindset, helped me to begin to solve the problems I had angsted over for so long. All along, I had thought that the purpose of college was meant to prepare you for some specific job or life path, but instead college has simply prepared me to live my life.