Excerpt from my unsuccessful Stanford University application essay

In the cold of October, the sunlight diminished. The light in my life vanished alongside it, leaving me stumbling blindly through the frigid night of emotional isolation. Depression had previously overtaken my life years prior; however, this felt different. The darkness appeared as a permanent fixture, a personal thunderstorm raining down on me. As commonly occurs with depression, I began to question my existence and wonder what meaning, if any at all, life possessed. Despite my initially nihilistic perspective, experiencing mental illness ultimately increased my understanding about the nature of life itself.

I found myself imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital in November of 2012. Society views such hospitals as institutions of insanity; conversely, the purest form of reason lies between the walls of a so-called “asylum.” The patients receiving treatment there helped provide me with a new perspective about the reality of the world. Ernest Hemingway explained in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” Hemingway illustrates a principle of reality that the patients of the hospital demonstrated to me, for indeed, many of them represented the good, gentle, and brave aspects of life; subsequently, the world tried to destroy them. However, society succeeded only in breaking them and strengthening them at the broken places, highlighting their resilience while facing the struggles of mental illness and the societal stigmatization of those affected by it. Contrary to my initial expectations, a prison of madness proved itself a sanctuary of sanity through the wisdom of those whose lives had seen the effects of mental and emotional agony.

The explanation as to how those emotionally afflicted patients not only survive, but rather, thrive as individuals resides in their resolve to find purpose in pain. The great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far?” Nietzsche illuminates the idea that suffering can, and often does, act as a catalyst for positive refinements within our society. This concept provides me with a sense of purpose in my experience with depression, and consequently inspires me to utilize the encounter I have had with emotional despair in a positive way.