One Story by Camryn

One Story by Camryn - May 2023 Scholarship Essay

In the first week of my AP Literature class, we discussed intertextuality - the idea that only one story has ever existed. Authors continuously pull from the works that have come before them, even subconsciously, so no work of literature can ever be truly original. Yet, we know without a doubt when we are reading a Shaksperian play. We easily recognize Thoreau as the father of transcendentalism when his original spin on it took from Emerson’s ideas.
I find the same to be true of the human experience. We share one human story. We have not lived something no one else has lived, felt something no one else has felt, or created something no one else has created.
Yet we know a friend by their laugh, a writer by their prose, an artist by their brushstroke. We have distinguished ourselves despite the fact that we are, by all definitions, ordinary.
I have come to understand that I can never be something truly original. I can only take from what has already been done, but I do not resent it. We build not only society, but ourselves up off of the pavement the past has lain. I am an individual because I am everything else.
I want to further my education in English because I want to study the one story of the world in its every facet. I want to dissect the writing back to its beginning and learn what ordinary moments the extraordinary are composed of. But more than that, I want the next part of my life to continue to build me. I want to find the people and the places that will become part of who I am. I want it to now be my mission to be as many others as I can so that I can continue to define myself for the better, and finally be individually me.