<p>Is it okay to write about personal problems for college essays, like depression, anorexia, or cutting, if I talk about how these experiences have changed me as a person and stuff like that. Here's a sample of one of my essays that I wrote about cutting.</p>
<p>In your life, you will come to a point where you are faced with obstacles or challenges. Everyone deals with these roadblocks differently, and the way that we deal with them ultimately determines our character. In my life, I have faced more challenges than the average seventeen year old. I faced the problems of abuse (verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual), and alcoholic father, an absent mother in my crucial teen years, and having to parent my younger sisters. I responded negatively to these events by succumbing to eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, running away, depression and anxiety. Even though this eventually led to several hospitalizations and getting kicked out, I have begun to work on overcoming these challenges daily. While the experiences were strenuous, they have ultimately made me a stronger person.
The most difficult challenge that I have overcome is my struggle with self-harm. I started self-harming when I was thirteen years old. I had a friend, Kiana, who would slit her wrists with a box cutter blade; when I found out about this, I was devastated. I confronted her about it and she explained to me how it made her feel better, releasing the built up stress and anger that she collected from her family and from herself. She couldn’t talk about how her family’s situation made her feel, so she took the anger out on herself. At first, I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to hurt him or herself. Even though I could not comprehend the process of cutting, it planted a seed in my mind and I became curious. Kiana had told me that cutting was a coping skill, and it made her feel better when she could not talk to anyone. I was often alone and felt that I could not communicate to anyone about the abuse I suffered from my father, because I was scared that my sisters and I would be taken away by Child Protective Services. I was worried that we would be separated due to our age difference if we were removed from my father’s custody.
On January 14, 2011 I cut for the first time. It was a Friday, and I had the day off from school. My dad woke me up at 4:30 a.m., when he got up, and told me to clean the entire house. Sleep deprived from the previous night, I haphazardly began to clean the kitchen, trying not to fall asleep. My dad walked downstairs after I had been cleaning for about an hour and decided that the kitchen was not cleaned to his satisfaction. He grabbed me by the hair and half dragged me over to the stove, which was “inadequately cleaned.” He pushed me away from him, and the force pushed me into the floor cabinets. At some point during this catastrophe, I had begun to cry. Upon seeing the tears on my face, my dad backhanded me across the face with his left hand, and the wedding band on his ring finger stung as it made contact with my face. He told me to “stop being a f***ing baby” and went back upstairs to make sure that my sisters had not woken up from the cacophony of noise that was created by our altercation. My dad left for work shortly after, and I went and sat down on the couch in the living room and began to sob uncontrollably. I had nobody to talk to and I was lugubrious. I remembered what Kiana had told me about cutting and how it helped her. I walked over to our knife drawer and grabbed the biggest knife I could find. I sat back on the couch and began to cut my wrist. For the first time in my life, I felt in control; I was able to decide how I was being hurt, how much pain I felt and, best of all, when to stop the pain.
After my first encounter with cutting, I began to do it more and more frequently. Once I got into high school, I stopped cutting because I had found another new “coping” skill- alcohol. I would drink whenever I could, but if I could not get my hands on any alcohol, I would cut. After my suicide attempt, I went to live with my grandparents and my alcohol supply was shut off due to the fact that I switched schools and my grandparents do not drink. So during this time, I went back to cutting. My grandparents discovered what I had been doing, and they took all of my razors away, hoping it would solve the problem. It did not and I simply found other tools to cut myself with. My fingernails became my new razors; nobody could take them away from me and if one of them broke, I had nine more as back ups. I tried to hide my self-inflicted wounds, but my grandma read through my journal and found out that I was still hurting myself. So the next day, I was admitted into the mental hospital and stayed there for 12 days. Upon leaving the hospital,my grandparents told me that I was not going to go back and live with them because they could not handle my self-destructive behaviors. They took me to a group home in San Diego, about half an hour away from their house.
I have not cut or self harmed since May, which is a major achievement for me. I now realize how much my self-harm affects the people who care about me. Although I am far from being perfect, I am not looking to escape the pain of my past anymore and I have learned how to appropriately deal with the stressors in my life. Instead of dwelling on my past, I look towards the future and work rigorously in school to achieve my goal of one day becoming an elementary school teacher. I am proud of how far I have come and am confident that I will continue to grow and thrive through any and all of the challenges that I will face in the future.</p>