By: Hiba Ali Chishti

شہ بے خودی نے عطا کیا مجھے اب لباس برہنگی

نہ خرد کی بخیہ گری رہی نہ جنوں کی پردہ دری رہی

the kingdom of ecstacy has granted me a robe of nakedness
my intellect no longer weaves a covering, my fervor no longer tears it off

If I had to term the overall nature of writing demanded by the Common App under one genre, I would term it under Creative Non-Fiction; specifically Auto/Memoir.

“A memoir is a non-fiction, first-person narrative focusing on specific, personal experiences, memories, or a particular period in the author’s life, often emphasizing emotional truth over a strict chronological timeline.”

The CommonApp asks you about the nature of your academic interests and where they stem from just as intensely as it asks of how and why you want to pursue them. The Common-App asks about conflict, friendship, loss, growth, joy, hardship and your favourite kind of tiramisu; all in the breadth of five hundred words. 

The college essay then, is a memoir written by someone who is still becoming the person they are trying to describe.

It is very important that you get to know this person.

Memoir, properly understood, is not concerned with extraordinary lives. It is concerned with the act of keenly observing your very ordinary life. There are certain moments where the mind lingers. It moves on. It returns. It rearranges. And misremembers. These moments are soft at the edges, sharp at the center. 

Good writing begins not at the point where you notice these moments, but at the point where you notice your noticing.

You are not interesting because something impressive happened to you. You are interesting because of the angle with which you observe it, and the nuance with which you write about it.

A writing practice then, despite its reputation, is not primarily about writing. It is about perception. A notebook accumulating fragments of weather updates, road closures, song lyrics, cricketing stats, phases of the moon. A journal under your pillow. A note in your phone. Documenting the joy of being unable to see out the back windshield because the car is filled with balloons, or the inability to fall asleep in your best friend’s room because her AC has a nest of birds inside it; who chirp ferociously come dawn. Harboring an overheard sentence that does not belong to you but insists on staying by your side. Sprinting across the futsal court with droplets of rain beginning to stain your uniform. Feelings you will never experience for the first time again… write them down. 

Discipline here lies not in producing pages upon pages of observations, but in refining the voice of your attunement. Why was this moment memorable for you? What did it make you feel? How does it feel when you feel?

It helps, at this stage, to develop an affection for your own peculiarities. The interests that refuse to make sense. The thoughts that arrive at inconvenient times. The version of you that does not perform well in introductions. The ‘bas yeh mera shouq hai!’, and nothing more.  

Originality is often mistaken for novelty in experience. It is, more often, novelty in perception.

So hone your interests; cultivate your weird, your goofy, your sensitive, your sentimental, your bizarre, your divine— live outside the margins; but write within the lines. 

The most compelling essays do not conclude so much as they continue; they allow for uncertainty and they welcome growth. They suggest a mind in motion; one that is willing to revise, reinvent, and renew itself. 

You are not presenting colleges with a completed self, a final version of your being, at the age of 18. You are merely offering them a record of your attention and a pattern of your thought.

A college essay then, with all your accolades and achievements, must also reflect your most authentic self: a person you are only just getting to know.

This is your Making. And you are its Maker.