College Admissions Essay: How Courage Changed My Life

What is courage? To some people, it is looking over and speaking to a sea of four hundred familiar faces. To others, it is smiling and greeting a person whom they have never met. Still, more people would define courage as looking down from the top of a high building without that dizzy feeling, or stepping onto a roller coaster for the first time.However, all of these things I can do without so much as a stammer in my speech or a catch in my breath. Only recently did I find a ‘courage’ that was real for me. I suspect that I am a very difficult person to understand. I experience, and perhaps suffer from, a drive that to most people seems illogical and unreasonable. I want to do it all, and perhaps the problem with that is that I can't accept anything as being done well enough unless I have done it perfectly. In my mind, "good" isn't good enough, I feel I need to be "excellent" and "extraordinary." I want to grab all I can from life, fill my arms with every kind of experience to the point to where if I add one more thing, everything I strived to achieve is dashed away, and I have to start from the ground up. I work to the point to where I can barely balance, and still refuse to drop any of the workload that I have picked up. I do this because the more I do, I feel that I am one step closer to the greatness I
This (was a person I trusted, and as time went on, he slowly began to change. But I continued to not give up on him, or our friendship. That in itself took almost more courage than I could muster. But it took even more courage to finally convince myself that I truly am worth more than was being given to me. I wasn’t going to be his punching bag anymore and once I realized that, once everything was over and done with, I realized that I have gained enough courage to stand up for myself and earn what I