Rivers of Power
On wanting to not want
In writing about oneself, one is pulled between two tensions. The first is rooted in the self—fueled by the euphoric pleasure of talking about our own opinions and experiences. As much as we may find our insights from our last relationship to be so obviously fascinating, the audience needs more. Which brings us to the second constraint, a need to find universal feelings in individual experiences. After all, we aren’t writing a diary entry. There has to be some root cause—some novel mix of feelings and thoughts—that invites readers to take what we have learned and apply it to themselves.
Staying balanced on this trapeze of prose is a difficult task that demands both concentration and conviction. Any hesitation or slip-up, and an author falls into the abyss of boring writing, never to return. They write essay after essay attempting to turn the mundane into the magnificent—about how they realized strangers have lives after people-watching at a cafe window. We have all, at some point, read a piece on Substack that leaves you with the unshakable feeling that the word “dichotomy” was not, in fact, the natural way to describe how the black coffee sat still in the mug. Its pervasiveness on this platform only confirms how alluring it is to play dress-up with your prose.
I say this all because, over the last few months, I’ve had to write, rewrite, and write anew an enormous number of college transfer essays. These essays are more an exercise in academic sadism than any real attempt at understanding an applicant better. You’re given five hundred words to convince someone you’ve never met, at a school you’ve never gone to, about a future you cannot predict. You end up writing sentences about how “ecstatic” you are to enroll in “POLS384: Industrial Steelwork in Yugoslavia.” Needless to say, it can get very boring.
There is nothing I hate more than boring writing. Boring writing is a scourge because it has no common trait. Boring writing can be cloaked in verbosity or stripped down to functionality. It can be found in a play just as easily as it can be in a paper. You can read an author and immediately feel the hour they spent before publishing dressing up every sentence with words they’ve never said out loud but thought would look good on paper. Or, just as easily, you can read a piece and be left astounded at how a human being could write with such lifelessness—how no secret is left hidden or feeling left implied.
Boring writing loves to fester in the constricted. It’s why when we log onto LinkedIn we suddenly become infected with the prose of a lobotomized robot. It makes sense, though. I think good writing—that being interesting writing—is found in a certain openness. An openness that, by definition, requires us to be able to write without a word count or the looming fear our boss may see that we are not solely focused on turning raw data into actionable insights.
You can understand why these colleges have prompts and word counts. Harvard will get over 1500 applications this year with fewer than a dozen seats to fill. If every student is writing five thousand word soliloquies about how joining the tennis team made them want to study accounting, there would be no way to evaluate every applicant. So, bad writing prevails out of a certain pragmatism—a conscious choice that we would rather have a human look at five hundred words than a large language model scan through five thousand.
But bad writing also emerges out of an understanding—one that every college brochure about “holistic admissions” loves to advertise—that there is some undeniable quality about us that makes these small odds not so small. It’s easier for our brains to imagine ourselves sitting in one of the twelve seats Harvard offers than swimming in the vast ocean of polite rejections. One seat! Can it be that hard? Could it not be you? Is it so hard to imagine that in those smoke-filled admissions meetings in Cambridge that your file, your essays, and your story make it out? Surely not!
In these hopes we find ourselves, once again, on the trapeze. At the other end is that recognition—that verification from the outside world that we are all we thought we were—and below us, a fall into the void of rejection. You are told by those who love and care about you that to even walk on the trapeze is admirable—that even in that void you will find meaning and success. They remind you that to reach the other end, no matter how great, is ultimately not up to you. If you’re anything like me you nod your head and smile, accepting their logic on its face while still deep down believing that falling is not how your story ends.
On my nightstand is my favorite page from my favorite book, Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes. Out of all the men profiled in the book, the sections on a young Joe Biden always stood out to me. There was some quality of Biden at this age that I felt connected to in a way that the other men, no matter how successful or ambitious, failed to. The way Biden, even as a kid, had an ability to look into the future—a future that, even then, he knew ended in the Oval Office—and use it as fuel. The way that underneath a very real sense of public service and familial pride lay an anger that the world worked in ways nobody wanted to admit. The way his resentment of rejection mixed with the hunger for vindication to create a man who kept at it.
I want to tell you that, over these months of waiting for a response, I have kept this frame close as a reminder that I, and only I, will be the one who determines where I end up. We all love a story of an underdog who proves that falling off that trapeze is not the end—that agency and intellect are really all you need. The reality, as much as it pains me to admit, is not as glamorous. Deep down, I know that no matter how hard I work and how much I succeed, I will never not be a little bitter. I will always wish that Harvard, Yale, and all the other selective and secretive schools had seen what I see in myself—that I could swim in the River of Power. That, if I were to be honest, is why I wake up to page 501 each and every morning.
Maybe this contradiction is why those admissions essays feel so lifeless—why those pieces about the self come off so stiff. Instead of thinking about how scary and hopeless the void below is, you focus on putting one foot in front of another. As long as you are walking and not falling, you can keep believing that you will reach the other end. Until you don’t, and what looked from above like the safest path becomes so obviously flawed from below. Only then can you see that what was needed was not careful choreography but courage. Courage to say that you really do want to be seen, celebrated, and vindicated.