Contemplating Contemptment by Millie

Contemplating Contemptment by Millie - March 2017 Scholarship Essay

Life is full of empty promises of contemptment. Self help books line the shelves, an infomercial sells a sermon DVD package for the hot price of $29.99- each promising to lead your wretched soul to success. Any citizen of The United States can agree that consumerism fuels our materialistic world. Society attempts to convey the falsified reality that you either need a twelve step program or magic pill to reach personal success. This commercial facade obscures the truth. The key to reaching personal success is in finding contentment in small means such as goal-setting to accomplish true fulfillment.
While most have realized that this pitiful fact is true, we continue to into the scheme that has become the process of contentment. In an act of proving my own willpower and testing my hypothesis, I set out a goal for myself- a task that typically would seem impossible to conquer- to stop biting my nails. It began as a habit of boredom that stayed with me until my senior year. I set my goal a few weeks ago, after a brief melodramatic episode, concerning a boy who “didn’t like me back”. A friend helped me acknowledge that I could do nothing to change the situation. I was better off focusing on moving forward than dwelling, noting the difference between problems that I can and cannot change. This stopped me in my tracks. This was a problem that no magic pill or twelve step program had a chance of fixing. Yes, I was incapable of altering another human being’s feelings towards me. But there were issues that I could change. That day I stopped biting my fingernails. I realized the undeniable certainty that the path to success is paved by small accomplishments and neat fingernails, rather than any mass produced key towards personal contemptment.