When Words Fell Short by Mackenna

When Words Fell Short by Mackenna - February 2026 Scholarship Essay

I have always found it difficult to express my emotions. The more I tried, the less my feelings made sense. When I first started journaling, I would stare at the blank page, grip the pink leather notebook with my name scribbled inside, unable to confine my emotions to a single sentence. Nothing felt big enough or accurate enough.
One night, instead of scribbling another paragraph of broken words, I picked up the guitar sitting in the corner of my room, plucked until I heard a pleasant sound, and then sang a line along with it. Somehow, that single line expressed everything I couldn’t bring myself to write down before. That moment became the beginning of my songwriting process. Words didn’t come easily, but the music did.
Learning guitar on my own meant a lot of replaying tutorials, memorizing the shapes of fingers during chord placement and celebrating the smallest victories like stretching my finger three frets over. It also allowed me to discover how different chord progressions can carry different moods. Before I think about lyrics, I experiment with chords. I slowly repeat patterns until one resonates. Once the chords feel right, I hum melodies over them. It sounds like nonsense at first, but I follow wherever my voice naturally leads.
The songs always start with a feeling I can’t untangle. Singing lessons helped me understand breath, tone and control so that the melody often reveals my emotion before my words do. Then the lyrics begin to take shape. I rewrite lines until they feel honest instead of dramatic, specific instead of vague.
Songwriting became the language I never had. It taught me to channel my creativity by breaking down overwhelming emotions into parts: rhythm, melody and phrasing. Then I am able to rebuild them into something I can understand. I don’t have to force my feelings into perfect sentences; I can just let them become music.