Hello, Tim!
I hoped that this wasn't another of those clichéd weeks. Alas, things haven't been going the way I wish they would for quite a long time already.
This week held some of my more sentimental and emotional days, and I believe it was the pressure coming from pushing the application schedule that made me like this. Just this evening, I finished the TWELFTH modification of my motivation letter. In normal cases, I would be willing to do a dozen times of refinement for my article. However, this time, I felt like I had lost connection with my motivation letter. If you have both the first and the latest version of my letter, you wouldn't think it came from the same person's head. I understand that since I was applying for a program that is entitled "International Business", there are a lot of things which I don't know about. Therefore, my cousin pulled practically all the strings she could find: the agency we paid to help us with the more complicated parts of the application, her friends living in NY who are apparently professors in business studies, a friend of hers who is still studying in Austria, etc. to help me check whatever I need to improve.
I was grateful. Seriously! But then when I see comments from different people start to contradict one another and was combined with my cousin's own opinion, I became confused. I re-read the passage I have now, and I cannot say that any paragraph belonged to me. It wasn't like the people were just helping me type out the paragraphs; I was the one who did the writing. But what I did was wipe away the paragraphs that were born from my own ideas and inserted ideas of other people, all of which I had no previous knowledge of. I babbled about the articles I had never read and the lessons I had never taken. There is absolutely no pride be taken when all I wrote was but some information crammed into a word processor.
I don't know how much naivety I still have in my thoughts but I thought in this kind of application forms you are supposed to show who you really are and what your personality is to convince the professor that you are the person to go to the program? What is it worth if all I did was try lying through my teeth? Every time I alter my passage according to what the grownups "recommended" me to add, something to include in my article, they told me how it made it look a lot better, but I didn't feel like they were complimenting my work, regardless of what they really thought; in my ears they sounded like praises to their own idea. The student in my head kept reassuring me that it was okay because this is what all students do and that the people who helped me all had some sort of relevant backgrounds which would turn out to be incredibly helpful. I tried to listen but it doesn't disperse the uneasiness in me. I guess, in the end, I am just too headstrong to admit that I dream of completing this application and come out successful so that I could hold my up high and stolz sein (which is "be proud" in German, a word I just learned last Wednesday). Anyway, I was a bit emotional, I understand, but it DOES feel good just to tear across the keyboard and type something HUGO-like.
As for the sentimental part, it was more like a premature nostalgia. I look at my bookshelf and thought of how I wouldn't be able to bring all my books with me, and it just sort of dawned on me that at the end of everything, no matter your wealth, your gender, your nationality, your sexuality (by the way, gay people will be lawfully recognized no matter what in less than a month after which would reach two full years of the highest Constitution ruling. Yay! All I need now is a boyfriend ha ha), you won't be able to take anything with you when you leave, either abroad or just depart from the consciousness of the world. It is just sad. I look at my mother and thought about all the things I'd miss about her and the roof under which we have lived for just a little shorter than my eighteen years of life.
I am grateful, at least, that we have something called the internet, which promised some video chat when I feel so lonely.
This is just what everyone experience before they go abroad to study, right?
Sincerely,
Hugo
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