Breaking the Box: A Reflection on Expectations and Self-Discovery by Kaitlyn

Breaking the Box: A Reflection on Expectations and Self-Discovery by Kaitlyn - July 2025 Scholarship Essay

What do you want written on your tombstone? Something funny, something smart? Who were you, really? That’s something that my past self worried about too much. I always wanted to make sure that I had a purpose, that I served someone. That was how I was going to make it, how I could live, and have meaning.

When I was little, I was always told that women have a glass ceiling they need to break through to make it in the world, to achieve what they wanted to achieve, their hopes, their dreams, their fantasies. I look up at the ceiling, expecting to see glass, expecting to see other women who have made it in the world, but I see something brown instead. I assume that it's dirty, and as I wait to get older, I wait for the day when I'll be able to clean it to come. As I get older and increase my collection of supplies to clean and escape this mental and physical box, I'm developing a multitude of talents and strengths that I know will help me to overcome this glass ceiling, how others broke through theirs: what worked for them, what didn’t, what they used, how they used it, anything and everything that I could learn to break through on the first try, so I wouldn't have to go back up and try again.

One day, I'm finally able to reach it, so I immediately bring all my things up, and I try and start cleaning it, assuming that it's just dirty. But it's much dirtier than I had originally thought. I can't see anything through the glass or what I assume is glass.
I scrub and I scrub and I clean and I clean, and I try different products, different methods, different sponges, anything that I think will work, until eventually I realize it's not glass but something organic because as I've been getting older and as I've been attempting to clean it, I see that it's rotting around the edges where I was cleaning it.
There's a slight crack in it that gets bigger and bigger. As I watch it snap, mouth agape, I keep wondering if this is the “breakthrough” that everybody else is talking about, not as dramatic as I thought it was going to be, but still a breakthrough nonetheless.

As my mouth, my mind, and my spirit are all open, waiting and wondering what this new world is going to be like where women like me rule the world, where we make the decisions, where we create our fantasies, where we can live our dreams, and live the way that we want to live, I suddenly taste a small crumb of something not quite right. It's very gritty, not at all what I was expecting. As the crack gets bigger than this organic substance, I suddenly realize that it's a wooden coffin holding me down under the weight of the world. I put so many people’s expectations onto me that I buried myself alive!

As the coffin cracks open, I'm left with a dirty taste in my mouth, because it is literal dirt that disgusts me so. Gravel and gravity are my greatest enemies, keeping me locked in this tomb, unable to open, unable to break out through the glass I was taught so much about, fantasized about, and wondered what the other side would look like. Where our achievements are looked at instead of judged, where our faults aren’t seen as faults but rather as qualities, where we can live the way we want to, with no negative consequences from society.

We don't have to choose this world where things hold us down, where our trophies are nothing but headers on our gravesites. With one simple choice, we can choose to place our trophies lined up neatly on the shelves instead of lining them up in cemeteries. It just depends on how we go about the world and how we choose to live it.

That is what I would tell my past self: You can either put your entire self on a shelf, putting you up for everyone to see—the good, the bad, and everything in between—or hide yourself even after death, where being buried looks the same. Everyone looks alike, rows of tombstones; the only way to tell one person from another is the writing on the header.