Although a personal statement is supposed to be mine, in the back of my mind I thought an admissions officer would look at this piece of paper that I had written and based my confession on that. Then I felt that even though it was supposed to be my story, it wasn't really what I wanted to say because the goal was to please someone else. At some point, all creativity was gone and my only goal was to have a perfect personal statement. The need to have a perfect personal statement did not allow me to write an essay that truly spoke to me. I had already decided to write what I thought the reader wanted to hear instead of what I really wanted. I decided, however, that even if the two questions “Is it good?” and “Does it suck?” Barry's gifts would haunt me for the rest of my life, if my personal statement wasn't really me, then I was going to school for the wrong reasons. It was surprising how, for so long, I struggled to write this life-changing essay and when I just let it go and started writing without worrying about perfectionism, I “… I was both there and not there…and the lines formed an image and the image made a story” (124). I was able to write an essay that mattered to me rather than something that was a flawed version of myself. It took me a week to write the essay I used instead of the three months it took.