College Essay

Sitting on a black tire that jutted out of the playground with my knees pulled up underneath my chin.  I sat, and I watched.  The wind blew across my hollow, pale cheeks as I observed the other four year olds running around chasing each other below me.    I can remember thinking, as my four year old self sat there, that I am not like all these other kids below me, I am different.  For starters, there is the personality. While other little kids where active and hyper, and always on an adventure, I was quiet and shy, and liked to watch, to soak up images.  I always felt a little out of place. Until, I got older.
It was around sixth grade when I started to realize that there is really nothing special about me.  If I wanted to get into college, I had to be special, be spectacular.  I couldn’t sit around watching and absorbing images, I had to go out there and create my own masterpieces.  I just wasn’t sure what exactly that masterpiece would be...

At first glance you will see an underweight upper- middle class white girl from suburbia.  And, let there not be any confusion, I most definitely am just that.  I tried for years to be something different, something to make me stand out of the crowd, but I failed, unfortunately, I am just a normal, plain- Jane girl from Arkansas.  After accepting the fact, I was speaking with one of my friends, when she came up with an ingenious idea.  We were sitting in a booth at just a regular old wanna-be 50s diner when she said, “Why don’t you run me over?”
And so that is how it happened. 
No, not really.  I did not run over my friend.  However, let it be known, that she did ask me.  She too, needed something interesting to write about for her college applications, because we are both just ordinary girls from private school in suburbia with a 4.0 GPA like thousands of other kids across the country.  There have been no events that have caused me to undergo a complete new personality change.  I was not involved in any gang fights, I haven’t ever been mugged, nor have I done the mugging.  I was never really bullied as a kid, and I did not do any bulling.  I was honestly, (though I did not think so at the time) just a regular, shy kid.
         
Except for my hair.

I have this dark brown hair, that is crazy wavy.  It is at least twice the size of my head, and it is so thick that I have popped rubber band after rubber band trying to get it to twist around my hair. 
When I was younger, I hated it.  I spent every night with a blow-dryer attempting to straighten my hair.  I would run brush after brush through my hair, buy different hair products, all of which promised “great results.”  I would be incredibly disappointed at the false advertising when they did not work.  However, I never gave up. I was persistent.  I was going to have beautiful, long, straight hair. 
When my mom told me to stop trying, did I? No, I kept at it.  My mom told me that people paid money to have hair like mine, and that I should be grateful to have such a gorgeous head of hair, because some people didn’t have hair at all. Now, I was grateful that I had hair, I just wanted straight hair. 
It was in eighth grade that I took the money I had been saving up over the years, and I bought a straightner.  I ran home with it, plugged it in, read the directions (which I was convinced must have been for complete idiots because it actually said do not use while sleeping, and do not use in shower), I picked up my brush, ran it through about an inch of my hair and ran the straightner over it.  It was amazing; my hair fell to my face silky and flat. 
For a few years, I enjoyed this “freedom” from blow-dryers.  I did not have to waste any more of my time, I could just quickly run a straightner over my hair, and it would be straight and flat, just like everyone else’s hair.
It was a few years ago, when one day I didn’t straighten my hair, I let it dry naturally, and as the waves formed back into my hair, I began to realize how much I missed it.  It was something different, something not everyone could have.  It was my hair, and who was I to tamper with it?

Now, I am not saying that my masterpiece is my hair necessarily.  But I am saying, that if I am that persistent and determined (or this word “stubborn” as some like to call it) about my hair, it does little justice to the persistence and determination I posses for something that I really love and enjoy.  Once I set my mind on something, I will not stop until I have succeeded.