In the summer of college application season, I wrote my Common App essay on a loved one’s death and its impact on me and my family. A few days after I shared it with a close friend for feedback, I found out that she had turned around and written about a similar experience of death and illness in her family — only it had never happened. My essay and my ideas had become a fictional story, retold and repackaged for another person.
“I kind of borrowed it from you,” she had said, smiling sheepishly, “But, you know, anything to get into an Ivy, right?”
After some thinly veiled “constructive criticism” that didn’t try very hard to hide my feelings, I asked her to choose another topic to write about. It was very clear that this had permanently changed the way I viewed her and our relationship, and she never shared her writing with me again. It was, all in all, a surreal experience that illustrated how ridiculously commercialized and insincere the college application experience had become. Yet, the weirdest part was that secretly I did understand. In a sort of strange, twisted way, I absolutely understood her desire to be taken seriously as a person, as an applicant, and as a victim.
It sounds awful, but we can all admit that being a “victim” has perks. In the NYT bestselling book, “Victim” (it’s getting a bit repetitive at this point), Andrew Boryga explores how the power of being a “victim” can bring an addictive cascade of sympathy, commiseration, and comfort. The main character, Javi, marvels at the praise and opportunities he is given because of his working-class background and the loss of his father to a shooting (which incidentally doesn’t affect him much; according to Javi, he was only “losing a person who was only kind of there”). Eventually, he learns to “game the system,” as he calls it, by purposefully leaning into his oh-so-tragic backstory to collect the rewards. Eventually, he hits the jackpot: what better way to start than to pour all of it into his college application essay to get into a prestigious college?
Of course, this is still a book with a moral center: eventually, Javi gets his comeuppance and learns to renounce his unhealthy dependence on self-victimization. But the immoral parts of our psyche can’t resist seeing the appeal of being a “victim,” particularly in something as consequential as college applications. College essays are, in theory, the magical gauntlets that allow schools to sift through applicants to find the diamond in the rough. The ideal college essay is supposed to come out spontaneously, written in a rush, a piece that perfectly represents your essence and “it” factor and hits the reader like a punch! The reality, instead, is that the writing process is slow and discouraging. It often ignites a kind of feverish pursuit in applicants to find the one essay that shows, deep down, how uniquely suited, smart or motivated you are to the admissions staff — yet each draft you write doesn’t seem good enough. Undergoing this process, it’s incredibly easy to see how an innocent search for deeper meaning mutates from honest competition to copious trauma dumping and self-victimization.
Looking back, I think about whether my friend’s and I’s intense academic culture had pressured both of us into recounting traumatic stories in a convoluted desire to gain power and respect. In this period of our lives, where we constantly search for a deeper purpose, it can be hard to resist the siren call of placing yourself as a victim. But in navigating our choices, we should learn how to take control of our narratives instead of falling into the safe complacency of victimhood.
Contact the editor(s) responsible for this story: Caitlin Donovan
