On Managing Anxiety and Understanding the College Essay

I threw up in my high school bathroom the morning of my first college application decision. In fact, was a nervous wreck my entire senior year. Almost daily, I would check my odds of admission online, comparing my scores to the averages that my target universities accepted, trying to maintain some sense of emotional control. My future lay in the hands of masked admissions officers, and my prospects depended on whether or not they deemed me “worthy.” The common app essay, while positioned as an exciting opportunity to differentiate myself from my competitors, terrified me. So, if you’re overwhelmed by college applications, struggling with limiting beliefs, or feeling incapable of overcoming your writer’s block and identifying where to start, I understand you. Let’s talk.

First of all, know that your anxiety around this task is not unreasonable. It is, in fact, an incredibly valid response to the situation you are in. You are stuck in a task environment that pulls for authenticity while applying obvious evaluative pressure. In this setting, you as a writer become incredibly vulnerable. As Karen Surman Paley of Boston College and Northeastern University writes in her article “The College Application Essay: A Rhetorical Paradox,” you feel you have no option but to take your rejections personally, since, in your essays, “[T]he person is what was projected. What [you] write is the conflicted product of the imperatives to relax and open up, issued by authorities who can exclude them." Given the personal stakes of the work and the power dynamic at play, it’s only natural you might feel a bit stressed out. No one can completely resolve these feelings for you, as the only way out is through, but I can, at the very least, offer some suggestions on how to conquer your fears and embrace the essay writing experience.

The surest way to relieve writing anxiety is to understand the rules of the task. The more you demystify the college essay, the more confident you will feel writing it. Now, the prompts you have to work with are quite vague, and you have no contact with the admissions boards of each university to get feedback on exactly what they appreciate. This dynamic is notably different from the teacher-student exchange that has likely made up your high school writing background. Such ambiguity is another way admissions officers test you; they are looking to see how you approach creative projects when you’re finally given a degree of academic independence similar to what you might experience in the college classroom. But answering the prompt originally and coming across as “genuine” to such an unknown audience is no small task, and it is, arguably, the most daunting part of writing the college essay. Luckily, I have an entire separate blog post detailing how to best “be yourself” in this context. Check it out here.  

Once you have a sense of the “right” way to be genuine in your responses, it can be helpful to review similar works with a critical eye. Many college counselors and English teachers will give you examples of “successful” college essays in order to help you understand how to write your own. But if you are an anxious personality, I cannot stress enough how much you should not read examples from other students. In doing so, you open up an instant channel for comparison, one that will likely intimidate you more than it will help you.

That being said, it is good to get an idea of how to express yourself in writing, as you probably have not had much experience writing in this genre. I would encourage you to look to creative nonfiction short essays. These tend to be longer than what you will be writing, and their authors had far fewer constraints when writing them, but they can give you an idea of how writers go about telling personal narratives within the boundaries of a short piece. I think this is the closest thing you can get to reading a college essay without actually reading one. For a list of good examples to use as starting points, complete with notes on which elements could work well in the college essay, click here.  

Of course, you are still writing an application piece, and it is good to grasp what that structurally looks like. When drafting, you can reference a loose college essay-writing model to make sure you are hitting the right points. Then, if you truly feel the need when you finish drafting, you can go back and read some real college essay examples that fit what you have already done. Saving this reference point for the middle of your writing process will ensure that you are only using other essays to improve your work and not to initiate it. This method will help you avoid drafting anxiety and preserve your all-important authenticity while keeping you on track with what admissions officers “expect.”

Speaking of the writing process, let’s break that down. Writing is, yes, a process: draft, revise, edit, proofread, publish (more on this in my podcast). The procedure is rarely this linear, but it is helpful to think about writing as an exercise with isolated steps. Breaking down your jobs like this helps you stay focused and avoid overstimulation when working. Many writers accidentally mix their editing in with their drafting phase, which only causes writer’s block and restricts the free flow of ideas that make up the meat of their piece. When you’re writing about yourself, especially in such a high-pressure situation, you don’t want to let your perfectionism slow your progress.

The easiest way to get your final product to its most “perfect” level is to let it first be horribly sloppy. Anne Lamott’s renowned “Shitty First Drafts” explains the importance of letting writing be, somewhat, systematic, because knowing there is a plan in place allows a writer to feel calm and take more risks in early stages. She describes a first draft as, “the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.” She then lays the writing phases out nicely:

[T]he first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

It's easier said than done, but allowing yourself to create a starting point without judgement will be both incredibly productive and, I daresay, enjoyable.

This leads me to my final point: be kind to yourself. I know this might be the last thing you want to hear right now, but really, everything will turn out just fine. You are a wonderful, intelligent individual with a very bright future, no matter what a college admissions officer decides about your application. It’s logistically impossible to fit your entire identity into these personal essays, no matter how much reviewers seem to want you to try, so know there is no way a rejection of your application can be a rejection of your value. 

But of course, I understand you want your work to be the best it can be. I think universities are correct in assuming that comfortable writing leads to better writing. So do what you can to find emotional safety while working on your essays. If you are collaborating with a tutor, lean on them. Ask them honest questions about all your concerns and let them do the research to help you with your worries. If you are working alone, turn to your parents, your friends, or your teachers. The world is full of kind people looking to support you, with your college applications and beyond. Find your team. So long as you know how the essay operates and that you are not alone, you can—finally—relax.