Charizard asked:


I wake up to a continuation of yesterdays puzzle, everyday. It’s a mystery I’ve been trying to solve since the 5th grade. The only problem is, I’m the puzzle. I’m stuck with this giant mess of bits and pieces I have to fill in and put together. The only way I’ll be happy is by solving it.

It’s taken me a number of years to even grasp a clue of what type of challenge I was facing. I sensed there was something wrong with me, but I wasn’t able to figure out what it was. In 8th grade I matched all the symptoms I was experiencing to something called Social Anxiety. So here it is, my puzzle, I have social phobia.

It struck me unsurprisingly as I realized I was just now beginning my puzzle. This was no ordinary Rubik’s cube or Sudoku game because it became a big part of my life. It was an unpleasant game I was forced to play daily. I remember in middle school people tried to talk to me and as my heart raced in panic, I’d nod my head and pretend I was listening. I wasn’t listening, I was too busy worrying that I would do something “stupid” and turn red in embarrassment. I turned red anyways even if I didn’t do anything stupid. At this point I gave up on my puzzle. I felt completely helpless in my situation, like there was absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Here comes the beginning of high school, the glory years as some would say. I told myself that if I didn’t disentangle this mess then I would have to keep stashing it away, that my social phobia will still live on with me slowly eating up my life like a parasite. I was mentally prepared now and determined to resolve my social anxiety no matter how long or how difficult it became. I set reasonable goals for myself and took small steps into cracking the puzzle. Everyday it seems, I turned a cube on the puzzle. Even if it was just a simple greeting to a friend or speaking up in class, both of which weren’t so easy at the time, I knew I would get better at this game.

Over halfway through high school I became very impatient with how long it’s actually taking to solve my puzzle. There have been times that I felt like I was already finished with my puzzle or was getting near the end of it. When I actually look back I realize I’m probably only halfway through getting things together. I conversed with people, I spoke up in class, and I stopped turning red in fear of becoming embarrassed, but I still wasn’t myself. I didn’t really open up to anyone at all and there was still that awkward feeling I have of a clogged throat when I talk to people. Out of all the people in school, why was I cursed with social phobia? How come no other guy I met had social phobia?

I wanted so badly someone to go through this puzzle with me instead of going through it alone. I know there’s medicine to help suppress the anxiety I have but that’s like cheating on the puzzle. I want to understand more about my social phobia and hopefully come out strong. Because of my social phobia I’ve since had a strong interest in health, medicine, and psychology. I’ve learned to embrace the puzzle as part of who I am as it slowly disappears.
am i better off turning this in or not…..i dont think the college requires an essay

Ravi M asked:

Choose an issue of importance to you—the issue could be personal, school related, local, political, or international in scope—and write an essay in which you explain the significance of that issue to yourself, your family, your community, or your generation.

Maria Mitchell stated that “we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.” These words of wisdom elucidate how I have lived my life and how I continue to live it; from the moment I was born to the instant my breath gets taken away. Knowledge, intelligence, creativity and imagination are all essential components to our lives, especially to me and my family mainly because our minds have a miraculous yet unknown potential that a lot of us take for granted. The intriguing minds that we are all armed with enable us to do an inestimable amount of things in life.
Personally, I have always seemed to value the knowledge and creativity that has endlessly emerged from others and stretched from person to person, almost like a virus replicating its DNA. Ever since I was a freshman in high school, I always aspired of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon primarily due to the medical field constantly being inundated with more and more updates and unyielding outbreaks in research. With such a career in a knowledge-filled field, I will be able to augment upon my knowledge and creativity and utilize it towards the research of many incurable diseases and conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. Furthermore, the challenging nature of a surgeon will help motivate me to study persistently and encourage me to read and stay up-to-date with the medical field. Despite the fact that I want to become a surgeon, knowledge and imagination are so prevailing in everyday life that they can assist in the development of many helpful inventions to mankind. Although it can be used in unethical means, we can apply it in such a manner that it will only be beneficial to life and our surroundings. From my perspective, I view knowledge, intelligence, creativity and imagination as the four advantageous pillars of life, the only entities that will last forever in a sense that somehow and someway any human being on this planet can impact their surroundings for the generations to come. If you think about it, what else in this life will last forever? After we die? The answer is something we leave behind in the form of knowledge or imagination through something we created with that imagination and/or knowledge. As a result, I’ve been encouraging myself to read whatever interests me and write whatever comes to mind and share it with my family, which brings me to my influential nature. Just as soon as I started reading about dementia, I always feared that someone in my family might get it. So to stop the worrying, I developed a daily mental stimulation activity that incorporated either math or science related games or activities in order to stimulate our minds and constantly keep it active to prevent my family from getting dementia. Although my family does love to read and write almost every day of their lives, I always share what I read in my pathology or anatomy and physiology textbook with my family so that we can learn something new every day and utilize it some way as they do the same. Along with these fundamental activities, I am also trying to incorporate a family “game night” that is comprised of playing Sudoku or some other mentally stimulating game in addition to exercising different portions of the brain. Additionally, whenever my mind is not in use or is just relaxing, I dictate random facts to myself and memorize the squares of several numbers and recalling the digits of pi. I also like to share my knowledge and imagination with others through tutoring or just randomly giving out random facts and frequently enjoy going on Wikipedia almost every day and read something and add on to it and later share the article with my family.
Evidently, through my writing you can see how much I value the knowledge, intelligence, creativity and imagination we all have, particularly my family and I. My family’s minds are always ambitious to gain more knowledge and intelligence and eager to improve and utilize our creativity and imagination to see what is outside the box.

Thank you for your time! I truly appreciate every second! =)