For those less than creative essay prompts that ask about your hardships and coming of age stories, how much do they actually want to know? Especially for UC essays since they’re very generic and I don’t have too many life changing moments to pick from except some that may be a bit heavy for a college application.
Remember that it’s a sales pitch, not therapy. Their goal is to get a sense of you as a person & some sense of who this person that they might be living with for 4 years. Your goal is to add some color commentary that rounds out the facts of your application (stats, curriculum, etc) and the adult perspective on you (LoRs) to show why their campus would be (to quote MIT Chris ‘a wildly better place with you’).