My Truth by Aiden

My Truth by Aiden - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

My internal struggles led me to believe I was supposed to be one thing. I'd constantly told myself I had no real talent, no defining passion; even if it was a joke. This was because I couldn't point to the one activity that made me special. I had spent years trying to prove wrong the people who assumed I wouldn't amount to much, who looked at me and saw someone unremarkable. Somewhere in that effort to disprove them, I started agreeing with them instead. I decided that if I couldn't be excellent at one clear thing, I must not be talented at anything.

This past summer, during a research internship, a friend named Emani helped me see how wrong I had been; not through a formal critique, but through the kind of honest, offhand feedback that only comes from someone who's actually paying attention to how you talk about yourself. Talking with her about the things I did in my free time, she pointed out something I had never let myself consider: I wasn't lacking a passion. I had several, and I had been ignoring all of them because none of them fit neatly into a single box.

I love the arts; design, color, the way a page or a poster can communicate something words alone can't. I love programming, the puzzle of getting something to work exactly right. I love building relationships with people, learning about their background, and I love making people laugh, even in small, unremarkable moments. None of these things individually would have satisfied the definition I was chasing. But together, they are the definition. I had just been too focused on finding a single label to notice that I was already whole.

That realization changed how I think about feedback itself. I used to treat feedback and self-reflection as a search for the one correct answer about who I was or what I was good at. If I got something wrong, or if I doubted myself, I read it as proof that I hadn't found my "thing" yet. Now I understand that learning isn't about arriving at a fixed identity and defending it. It's about failure. It's about doubt. And it's about persisting through both anyway, because the discomfort of not having it all figured out is actually where the growth happens. Feedback became something that helped me see myself more clearly, not something that told me whether I had "passed."

I think often now of something the 14th Dalai Lama once said, that in the struggle for freedom, truth is the only weapon we possess. The struggle for freedom was something I internalized through my self-deprecating thoughts. It was a fight against the narrow, easily digestible version of myself that other people, or even your own doubt, try to hand you. The only way through that struggle is truth: the honest, sometimes uncomfortable act of actually looking at who you are instead of who you think you're supposed to be.

I am not defined by one talent or one passion. I'm defined by all of it at once; the art, the love for programming, the people, the laughter, and for trying new things. That is what this past summer taught me, and it's a lesson I carry into everything I do now: growth doesn't come from finally being defined. It comes from refusing to be.