NOT for my official college essay, but for an internship application, I have to answer the common app prompt about a challenge, setback, or failure and my resulting growth. I don’t have any other prompts to choose from.
I want to write about how my mother’s physical and psychological abuse has affected me. However, since said abuse is still a very real challenge that I’m facing every day, I’m having difficulty finding the ¨life lesson/how I grew as a person/what was the positive result¨ that makes it a real essay and not just a depressing sob story.
My first instinct was to scrap this essay and write about some other challenge, but everything in my life pales in comparison to this one defining trauma. Everything else I write seems trite, fake, and over exaggerated.
My question is, do I lie and make up some life-altering lesson to make a good essay? Or do I suck it up and write a lame essay about something else? Or do I write an honest but poorly formed essay about this personal struggle? I just have no idea how to frame this.