I read my college admissions file. I regret it.
- Kaila Morris
- Jul 23
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 13
I thought reading my college admissions file would bring closure. Instead, it unearthed pain I’d spent years trying to bury.
As I write this, I want to cry.
Not a pretty cry—no, these are heavy tears. Heavy because they are, in a sense, tears of loss. This is grief. I grieve for the girl I was at sixteen, who felt ambitions so improbable and feelings so intense that she immortalized them upon her wrists. I grieve for the girl I am, who I love, who I wish I had become sooner. I grieve for lost happiness, lost time, lost perspective; lost, not because they ever existed, but because four years ago, I overlooked the idea of their existence. This grief weighs against my heart, pushing it down into an abyss between my chest and my stomach, where my soul is caught in a forever freefall to Nowhere.
Reflecting on my college admissions process hurts the way forsaken love hurts. That is what it was, after all. When I toured my first campus, a bottle of champagne uncorked itself within my chest, bubbling through my heart, pouring outward in a giddy smile. I peered through a crevice in the rock wall between present and future and saw independence, and opportunity, and adventure. I had the talent to scale the stones; I had spent three years making sure of it. Now, I only needed the resolve. But as the months passed, my resolve wavered. By my last application, submitted on the eve of January 2nd, 2022, with fifty-four minutes to spare before midnight, I had betrayed myself so profoundly that I sobbed myself into sleep. I still remember that hollowness, a grief for a loss I couldn’t yet name, having pushed myself past every limit only to feel nothing in return.
So, yes—I think I will allow myself these tears.
But as I cry, it will not be for what could have been but rather for what is: the heart-shattering reality of our society and its institutions of higher-education. I cry for a system which forces teenagers to become 17-page files read with a fraction of the thought that went into their development, scored on a scale that reduces us into metrics. I cry for the teenagers who equate their value with a binary decision that comes in a three-paragraph message void of any personalization or feedback (besides, perhaps, the recipient’s first name). I cry for the children who grow up believing the summation of their childhood must add up to an output consisting of acceptances to every acclaimed program and honor society and elite university.
I cry for elitism, and comparison, and prestige.
My college friends never talk about their admissions process. I think, perhaps, it pains them too. I wonder if their high school selves read statistics—mean standardized testing scores and grade point averages, percentiles and standard deviations—and calculated their odds of acceptance. I wonder if they scoured the internet for every article, every video, every forum thread, by strangers sharing their admission stories. I wonder if they compared themselves to those strangers. I wonder if, in their comparisons, they were better, or if their self-esteem raised that rock-wall-to-freedom another twelve feet higher. Did they stress? Obsess? Depress? I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.
I read my admissions file, once.
It arrived in a tidy PDF. Clinical, like a lab report, like I was a specimen whose entire existence could be catalogued into five categories of evaluation. Outstanding, excellent, excellent, outstanding, outstanding. Two adjectives, repeated five times total, to describe the classes, grades, recommendations, activities, and essays I had spent years cobbling together with aching hands and a tired heart. Here was my adolescence summarized in what amounted to two and a half pages of notes. There were comments, too, a few sentences per reader: praising a phrase, commending my altruism, noting my “outstanding commitment to social change and sustainability.”
Sustainability. Was that what each 3AM breakdown was about? Was I being sustainable when I collapsed in my high school hallway—exhausted and starved from three empty meals, skipped to make room for productivity? When I refused therapy to make time for my “four sustained extracurriculars with 5+ leadership”? This was polished pain. I had exploited my struggle into narrative gold, my suffering into a profound and “beautiful” personal statement.
I had forgotten how much I hurt during those four years of high school, competing for a reason to believe I mattered. Reading my admissions file reopened a wound that hadn’t yet had the time to heal. Worst was the guilt of the realization that followed: I was one of the lucky ones. Amidst the sacrificed friendships, the inhumane course loads, the four rejections, I got my dream school. How dare I have the audacity to mourn through my privilege? The shame hurt me most.
And yet, as I read through the portfolio of accomplishments that culminated in my college acceptance—the honors won, the initiatives founded, the funds raised—none of it felt like enough to justify the cost. I had earned validation from a system that would never see me: the scars on my body, the heaviness in my heart, the strength required by my mind to continue. I had hidden the most real thing about me, the most authentic struggle and victory in my life, to meet the expectations of a rubric.
Maybe, someday, we’ll learn to value people beyond their performances. Our children will not be resumes, but human beings who honor themselves for their messy brilliance, more holistic than any university claims to be. They will not need to polish their pain into portfolios demonstrating their potential. They will build futures that don’t cost them their childhoods. Until then, I will cry—for what is, and for everything we bury just to be seen.
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