I am sitting. I am sitting, I am crying and I am praying someone can locate an acrobatic fireman without a collar bone to drag me out of this deep, miserable hole I've dug myself into this afternoon. As made clear in many of my posts on SheWrites, I'm a poet applying to law school; yes, it feels about as unnatural as it sounds, but I want it. I want it so bad, I can feel it in my marrow, in the follicles of my hair dirty from application-distracted neglect, in the thin skin below eyes too exhausted to be held at full mast today.

If I desire this so genuinely, then what' the rub? you're wondering. Personal. Statements. That's what.

As a poet with a double major in Rhetoric, the 'self' is a topic I'm consciously moved away from in my writing. The resident poet at my University claims that writing about "I, I, I" all the time is "too easy," and my belief system on the matter aligns for the most part with his notion. I have made a conscious effort to move outside of myself, to write about that which is known yet foreign to me - to challenge myself in this way. Of course, this challenge is definitely in conversation with my major in Rhetoric. Though - perhaps my saving grace - Rhetoric is also the major wherein I've learned the most about metathinking, about reflection and about writing about the self in terms of thought, process, knowledge - post-production.

And yet, for the life of me, I'm sitting in my Writing Center whimpering in the corner. I'm applying to 17 schools (feel free to start appropriate shocked judgment: Now), which equates to somewhere between 6 and 10 essays to write.

How to do this? To sell myself, a girl wholly fond of modesty? How to magically decide what these schools view as "significant?"

And, most importantly: Publication. My trials and tribulations with being an editor, with submitting my poetry to a vast number of forums, with writing for the personal in general. Is this "significant?" Can it be molded into a scope that will convince the big, scary schools?