Time to get personal!
This essay was mainly to begin our process through writing our college essays. I wasn’t expecting to have a topic I’d feel extremely passionate about writing up until we began brainstorming and I began to realize how a lot of who I am has been thanks to staying true to a self who is until this day connected to a kid who still believes in magic and fantasies so I decided to use this for my essay not only for college admissions to get to know a little bit about me and what led me to do what I love but for me to look back on it and embrace that story.
I’ve never accepted growing up. When I was a third-grader in Mexico, my favorite part of school was the playground. During lunch, my friends and I would create our own universe, filled with surreal creatures we would find in Disney movies and fantasy books. There’d be times in our adventures that I’d have to rescue my friend from the giant tarantula that threatened our world.
This imaginative life continued well into my early teenage years when my family moved to America. I was about to start middle school, and adults started to tell me I needed to grow up, I’d left my infant years and it was time for me to look to the future. Yet, as I sat in science class, all I could do was look out the window and imagine what it’d be like to break the laws of physics and fly away to a star. In spite of the sobering reality of my new responsibilities, I was convinced I could find a way to stay young forever.
As I clung to my childhood, the grown-up pressures of high school began to haunt me. I had the parents who always pushed me to excel in my academics. They exclaimed, “Necesitas buenas calificaciones para obtener becas”—you need good grades to obtain scholarships! They insisted, “Tienes todas las oportunidades que nosotros no tuvimos”—you have all the opportunities we didn’t have. They were right.
However, I was also a daydreamer. Every moment I had the chance to disconnect, I’d put on my headphones and travel back into my imagination marveling at the stories and adventures I had long left behind. When the time came to reconnect with reality, I found myself grinding through class after class, purely for the sake of a good GPA.
Eventually, I’d begin to realize that perhaps growing up was my only choice after all. I’d never been the one to stand on the spotlight but the stigma of having a friend group began caughting up to me. While I read through every graphic novel in the library, my peers were out socializing, and as time passed I became more introverted. My mom began to take notice of my lack of passion and self-isolation. She suggested I go to our local teen center, but I failed miserably at finding a single friend after weeks of attending.
I knew I needed social connections with people that helped me move along with the rest of the world. Finally, in the middle of sophomore year, I decided to take a leap of faith by joining Freestyle Academy. There, I could study animation with the hope to find something that would bring me some joy.
To my good fortune, this academy did more than I could’ve hoped for. One of the wonderful things about Freestyle was not only that my peers and I got to work with advanced software, but our community created a habit of sharing ideas and developing productions as a team. At the beginning of the year we were given the assignment of creating a walk cycle with both stop-motion and 2D animation. As we began to build our set, my team discussed possible character designs. In the process, I began to recognize the same heartwarming feeling of jumping back into my neverending world of imagination. Better yet, I wasn’t left to dream alone when there was a whole group of like-minded people who yearned to have their stories told.
I’ve learned that there is no rule that growing older means forgetting about being a child and letting go of one’s imagination. In a near future I can see myself unable to place my pencil down and continue to create fantastic stories to show the world, and maybe even inspire someone out there to allow their inner kid to live for a while longer.