College Admissions Essay: A Lie

At the age of 12 I created an obstacle for myself so complex it would take the courage of 1,000 years to overcome. At the age of 12 I told a lie. A lie that I used to get attention from my friends and family for reasons I didn’t even know. After all, I thought to myself “what’s the harm in a lie?” At the time, I didn’t realize this lie would prompt me to tell more lies, nor haunt me, for the years to come. For personal reasons I cannot share what exactly these lies were, only that they nearly destroyed everything I had. At the age of 17, the start of my destruction, I knew it was time to tell the truth. My lies were getting out of hand and it needed to stop. The consequences that followed made me realize, it is better to be honest with nothing, rather than a liar with everything. It was from that moment on that I vowed to always try my best to be honest. I remember sitting in my desk starring at the pages of a book I was pretending to read in my zero period D.E.A.R class; (Drop Everything and Read). In the dead silence I began to think about, at first random things; Love, Fame, the girly things. Then, my “habit” crept into my mind. I began to think of what I was doing, who

I felt that my life was hopeless and I was nothing but a thing taking up useful space. I could kill myself, was a thought; get it over with maybe. But I was too scared to see what waited for me in the afterlife so I just sulked in a ditch of my self-made misery. After a few months of depression, disrespecting my body in every way I could, and digging a deeper ditch, I again began to think. Scary enough because at the time I was doing anything I could to prevent myself from doing exactly that; since it seems when I do, I get myself into trouble. Never the less I began to think; again of what I was doing, who I was hurting, and how that pain must feel. I was destroying my life and becoming the one thing I feared to become the most, a