XXXII. mamma mia 2: here we go again

the application essay

I have been M.I.A. (ha). Between grad applications and work, I am living nap to nap. leave you with the application essay that sucked all the generative energy from my brain. I must say a big thank you to anyone who has read/engaged with this newsletter, basically everything I wrote is the direct result of these biweekly missives. It is behind a paywall, but regularly scheduled free posts will make their triumphant return next week.

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In preparation for this response, I reread my Common App essay from senior year of high school. I had remembered I wrote about acting—the difference between success, which until I was sixteen meant being a Disney Channel star, and craft, which I had come to a profound if slightly overzealous respect for after three years in a Meisner program. I began formally pursuing acting at fifteen, when I joined Playhouse West-Philadelphia. My time there remains foundational. It is where I learned rigor, and served as my first foray into the act of living in imaginary circumstances. Rereading my essay, I was amused to realize I have been seeking the same thing under different names for over a decade: I end the piece referencing transcendence. On the cusp of matriculation, I couldn’t have predicted that trading my intended Theater Studies major for Religious Studies would inadvertently reveal what it was I had been stumbling towards. 

Three weeks into my first semester, in the kind of serious wood-paneled lecture hall I had only seen on television, we were discussing the ecstatic visions of medieval mystics. From our modern vantage point my classmates and I dismissed them easily—starvation-fueled hallucinations, God-as-dehydration.