My Struggle with Personal Statements

The personal statement is one of the strangest writing assignments that can be thrust upon someone. With almost no direction you are asked, in a 1000 words or less, to tell your story. This is ludacris. It is founded on several outlandish assumptions.

First the idea that I have idea what my story is or that it has any degree of a reasonable progression or plot that I can easily understand is wishful thinking at the best. My "story" is a series of impulsive decisions made moment by moment by former versions of myself that are as unrecognizable to me now as a stranger form halfway across the world. To hold me not only responsible to these former version of my self but to expect me to be able to justify them and assemble them in some compact linear form is simply asking the impossible. 

Secondly to expect me to be able to convey my entire essence of being in a form of prose limited to 1000 words is like asking Da Vinci to invent a helicopter with only lead as a base material. Prose is fine for stories, narrative, and essay but what in God's name makes you think that my heart and soul is most readily conveyed in any of those forms? And on top of that you impose a word limit! Oh tyranny! What if Dickens was limited to only 1000 words in writing David Cooperfield? Imagine the beauty of growth, the ebbies of conflict, the shades of morality that would have been forsaken for no other purpose than convenience! If you wish for convenience then please do not be so brazen as to ask me to lay bear my soul! 

Finally, and probably most idiotically, is the assumption that you or anyone is capable of assessing this rendition of my being. That you can somehow judge the quality of how someone chooses to present their "story". Were I too send you a black and white picture of Nietzsche or a Walt Whitman poem who are you to say that this some how lessens my potential contribution to the world? These things may hold unknowable value for which you could not possibly begin to understand and I certainly couldn't describe in prose in 1000 words. Ah but for convenience, for convenience and clarity it is that we must apply these assumptions and constraints. I only warn that these constraints for convenience will not end with application and paper processes that these constraints become a state of thinking and soon, if something is not convenient it is simply not worth doing.