Volume 5, Entry 23: Lost Words

My favorite personal statement and the quest to recover it

This past January saw my biggest leap as a teacher since deciding to run Diamond Day. Mid-month, I contacted 25 juniors I knew from Accelerated Math and Calculus AB and invited them to a short meeting to discuss college essays.

The giant leap was definitely not the subject matter. Personal statements and college admissions have played sizable roles in my work and life for years. I’ve been reading and advising students on them since the early 2010s, I’ve observed my students’ stress over them year after year, and I even centered my novel, Sweet Appeal, around the subject. Since 2020, I’ve also been hosting a ninety-minute seminar in the fall discussing them, a project Alyiah and I engineered during the pandemic.

That last item, the college essay seminar we call Personal Insights on Personal Statements, motivated my outreach in January. In 2023, I read dozens of students’ responses to the UC Personal Insight Questions (PIQs), but almost all were within six days of the application deadline. I left tens of thousands of words in comments and suggestions during that tiny window, but I knew time would limit the writers’ ability to use my feedback. I also knew that their stress at that time drew from the time crunch as much as the activity: all would sweat their future admission decisions, but those with applications sewn up before Thanksgiving could preserve perspiration.

Thus, I sought to relocate and expand my two-hour fall seminar into a one-week summer class. Instead of rushing through strategies and skimming samples, I could carefully cultivate an efficient and repeatable process for writing those UC PIQs that ports nicely to other college essay formats.

Moreover, by scheduling that work in June, students could apply those lessons all summer and get ahead of the work while I could offer substantial feedback during a time when I also have less on my plate. In case you haven’t figured it out: I love writing, reading, and responding to these prompts. Each one is a mini-newsletter! Personal narratives demonstrating growth comprise much of my writing; I could and would do that work forever. It’s the stressful timing that frustrates me.

So I invited them to hear my pitch. I had 20 or so show up, and I made an impassioned plea for them to give up fifteen hours of their summer breaks to engage with this premise. I leveraged my finances, pointing out that I would pass on grading AP exams and the four-digit paycheck it promised to teach them. Their peace of mind would justify my investment.

Because eighteen expressed interest, I submitted my withdrawal to CollegeBoard and ETS. After a few months of logistics and more timely conflicts slowing my progress, I sent out the official registration flyers in May and ended up with a roster of sixteen without any additional advertisement, a manageable cohort to pilot this work with.

Planning the class has been my primary focus for the past six days. I met with Alyiah on Friday to iron out my flow, and I closed Zoom with an ambitious but attainable plan packed with interactive activities and collaboration. At this writing, I’m not done with the PowerPoints for the final few days, but I’ve written eleven samples, created eight activities, generated instructions for each, and stretched my comprehensive course outline Google Doc to twenty-three pages. I’ve also hired Raf to write the remaining samples and scheduled demonstrations starring him and Alyiah.

Conservatively, I’ve spent thirty hours on the course already, and again, I have more days of slides and one writing sample to produce. It’s hard work, but it’s engaging work. Stressed though I am over this first run, I’m psyched and excited to be teaching it.

Still, developing all that has necessitated a few breaks, and I’ve taken them. Many have been for naps or meals, while others have featured the potent combination of walks and Sporcle quizzes. [[ I’m up to 88% on naming the 299 quarterbacks drafted between 1994 and 2019, which sounds insane and also is. ]]

On Friday afternoon, after several hours of outlining and creating, I took a break and found my mind drifting, not to obscure NFL signal callers but old personal statements. For day one, I designed an activity where students would take topics I’d read PIQ responses about and speculate over which prompt they answered. This would lead into practice spinning experiences and interests toward prompts, an invaluable skill when selecting focuses for four separate PIQs.

This naturally got me thinking about the essays I’ve read over the years, which motivated me to revisit some of my all-time favorites. I quickly found the one about makeup that I’ve quoted before , as well as ones about navigating a conflict during Drumline and ending a gymnastics career.

Reading the words of former students now in their mid- to late-twenties wowed me. They once sat in the same place that sixteen rising seniors will this week, looking uneasily at the college admissions landscape. They shared personal stories and trusted me to help guide them to a good place. I want to think that I did.

Naturally, my thoughts soon shifted to my favorite personal statement of all time. Although I read my first-ever “No notes” draft in 2023, my all-time favorite found me in 2015. Written by a student named Ryan, whom I taught for two years in Calculus, her piece centered on a box filled with collections.

Written with stylized eloquence I’d place in the 99th percentile, Ryan’s writing immediately wowed me. I’d read flowery prose before, but this wasn’t thesaurusized poetry but a mix of syntactical diversity and perfectly calibrated tone. I could hear Ryan’s voice in her words, but yet they read with an intimacy that made me feel like I was looking on beside her. Its polish portended artful creation, but the piece could have also been the transcript of her inner monologue.

More powerful was the topic she centered on. Her piece reflected on a box containing that collection of collections, a nod to her many diverse interests. As she rummages through the contents, she ruminates about her next steps as defined by narrowing. College forces decisions and directions, undercutting her innate desire to explore everything.

Never bitter, Ryan’s closing offered optimism about the countless paths before her. Still, the piece played in a melancholic minor key that marked a transition from childhood’s innocent, open canvas to the rigid lanes of emerging adulthood.

I teared up on my first read back in 2015; I got the chills just thinking about it in 2024. While the “no notes” masterpiece this year resonated with me, Ryan’s landed at a personal fulcrum moment: I had bought a house and stood poised to leave my childhood home for the first time. As she stared down change via boxes filled with adolescent totems, so did I. Amid my deepest bout of depression then, too, Ryan’s piece reminded me there was hope beyond those endings. It was exactly what I needed to read right then.

Which undoubtedly contributed to my desire to read it again. Hers was the first piece of student writing that stirred me; it wasn’t the last, but you never forget the first. I’ve referenced hers as a pinnacle personal statement so often that it’s borderline lore. I would never share it with a class of students just getting started in the genre, but I wanted to bask in it again as I stood on the cusp of expanding my once-narrowed path.

Her essay, legendary though it was, hadn’t crossed my eyes in years. Pausing my planning, I decided a sightseeing detour to 2015 had merit. Revisiting Ryan’s words would set the tone for my new adventure. Nostalgic anticipation filled me. I couldn’t wait.

Soon, though, I discovered I would have to.

Because Ryan’s essay was gone.

*****

I watch a lot of YouTube.

What I watch on YouTube varies. My shift toward it began with NBA 2K rebuilds captained by Kenny Beechum and Clique Productions during the pandemic, but that soon morphed into other sports content until Nate got me into video essays in 2021. There’s been an endless stream of those ever since.

These days, I’ve picked out favorite creators whose Patreons get my money and new videos become appointment viewing. I’ve referenced many before, from Jenny Nicholson, The Canvas, Emplemon, and LocalScriptMan to newer favorites like Rowan Ellis, Patrick H. Willems, and WolfyVGC. When I inevitably cancel cable, these will be the names that convince me.

That said, there remains a genre of videos I watch that sits outside the individual faces I flock to: lost media. Devoted to the search for movies, music, programming, and even commercials that have faded into the past, a bevy of channels detail mysteries, investigate leads, and celebrate searches in hopes of unearthing obsolete artifacts.

Lost media compilations flooded my recommendations last year, diversifying my understanding of the genre. Lost cinema and television shows got me in the door, but slowly, other branches grabbed me. Lostwave swept me up first, the snippets of incomplete songs constantly feeling familiar and haunting, but later, I got into other unknown origin stories, be they PSAs, creepypasta, or photographs. Everything fascinates me; I thrill over close calls and bemoan dead ends while spooning down applesauce each morning.

If you follow the lost media world, you might already know that the previous six weeks have delivered several incredible finds. I’m only a peripheral part of the community, but I don’t think I’m wrong in declaring two as all-timers so big they’ve cracked the mainstream.

The first originated in Lostwave: the source, title, and artists behind the iconic “Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives)” clip from 2021 were discovered on April 28, 2024. Once hailed as among “the biggest and most enduring musical mysteries on the internet” by The Guardian, the song secured an identity when Redditors used a Canadian database to identify candidates and eventually track down the aggressively 80s earworm. We’re still waiting for the official track to re-release independent of its adult film origin, but the Booth brothers promise something soon.

The second discovery is more challenging to describe, but you’d best believe my jaw dropped over its unearthing. The Backrooms image, a photograph of an oddly partitioned room with yellow wallpaper, had long been representative of liminal spaces, those uncannily empty areas that induce disconcerting sensations in viewers. The subject has inspired short films, video games, and entire communities, but that original, oft-shared image specifically has captivated Internet users since 2019, with many wondering both whether it was real and, if so, where it was taken.

We got our answer last week: the image depicted the second story of a converted hobby shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. What had been furniture store stalls became a toy car race track, and the photos had been shot in 2003 to document that renovation.

While these two cultural artifacts might not rivet you, they leave me giddy. The sheer unlikelihood of unearthing a photograph from a twenty-year-old toy store blog and a song from a forty-year-old adult film leaves me shaking my head. I’ve done no justice to the respective searches, about which I’d already watched at least a dozen sprawling videos apiece before the mysteries were solved. These are bottled messages fished out of endless oceans by tenacious sleuths insistent they can beat the odds. I marvel at their persistence.

As someone who looks backward so often, my fascination with lost media was probably inevitable. Much of what I write bridges some elements of the past to my present. While I aim to glean insight from old artifacts with an adult’s lens, an odd sensation accompanies returning to the past. So much of what molded me happened and slipped away before I knew how vital it would become. Ever the physical media guy who relishes manifesting memories and moments in a tangible form, I carry an existential fear of disappearance. If that which shaped me can disappear, so too might my link to the past.

Which brings me back to Ryan’s personal statement. Unlike “Ulterior Motives” and the Backrooms photo, I had no Wayback Machine, Canadian records, or subreddit of digital sleuths to lean on. Sometime during the fall of 2015, Ryan shared her personal statement with me. I read and responded to it, noting its majestic, moving power. I recognized it as a significant artifact, so I must have sought to preserve it. Right? Right? That tendency isn’t new.

Although my attention should have been on the class with its starting session quickly approaching, I minimized the PowerPoint window and began my hunt. Inspired by those fruitful spring searches, I deemed locating her writing an urgent matter. I couldn’t start anew without tapping into that document that Ryan had surely long ago let go of.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t learned anything from the sprawling searches that preceded those recent finds. My own quest immediately stymied me: after checking every saved draft I had on my flash drive, my hands remained empty.

I expanded my foraging. Pulling out all six USB sticks and both external hard drives, I ran reasonable queries for files featuring keywords that I saved during dates in that fall 2015 range. These explorations weren’t without valuable outcomes—I found and organized dozens of other students’ PIQs, including several beloved ones—but Ryan’s remained elusive.

My search moved to the school district’s servers. At first, I combed through files with “PIQ” in their file names, but I regretted that narrowness a few minutes in. The UC system adopted the PIQ format in 2016 after Ryan began college. Hers truly was a personal statement—pertinent knowledge but a detriment to my reliance on nomenclature. Scouring every file in that date range yielded nothing, though.

Neither did my email. The district archives messages for exorbitant stretches, but seven years falls well outside their range. I hadn’t forwarded it to my personal email account, either. Worse, the original platform used in our district, Schoolloop, where any email from Ryan would have originated, was replaced the following summer. Dead ends all.

During a dejected dinner, a lightbulb flashed on: surely I had written about her piece! Back in 2015, I still journaled nightly; there’s no world in which her wise words went unremarked upon by me. I was correct: I had written about her piece. But my writing gilded it with glowing praise. I never pasted in its contents. My inspection shrunk my date window—I read her piece between October 1st and 20th—but nothing more.

The idea that I would find her words mixed into mine had been a long shot. In truth, I began to worry that she had submitted a physical copy. While form-obsessed me would have seemingly delighted in that tactile twist, a printed copy made discovery less likely. In that case, I’d have written my feedback on her page and handed it back to her. I had checked all files from that month, including scans; I had still been sleeping at my parents’ then anyway, my bed not arriving until November. This seemed like the end.

I worked on my course outline post-meal, hoping that space from the search would see my brain conjure a solution in the background. My only new idea was seeking out Ryan herself, something a Google Search made reasonably possible, but even I knew that was unlikely. While I’d like to think the writing I recalled so fondly spoke to enduring traits, she’s 26 now—a lot changes in eight years. Everything changes. Her box of collected collections would be coated with dust. An 8.5 by 11 sheet with scribbled feedback from her math teacher hardly begs for preservation.

When I finally retired for the night, I did so empty-handed, with a decidedly sour feeling in my gut. Although most people are far more organized than I am, how many hold onto their high school personal statements through dotting the i’s on a Master’s thesis? I would; I still have my original UC submissions from 2003. But just as I knew my concern over a short essay from a student I hadn’t spoken to in eight years qualified me as odd, so too did my clutching at aging artifacts.

I had to make peace with the fact that Ryan’s essay was gone. Despite its powerful pull and all of me that traces back to it, her literal words on the page had become legends alone.

The search was over. There would be no Booth Brothers for my mini-mystery.

Syncing my FitBit and uploading my 1 Second Everyday clip, I sighed and connected my phone to its charger. As I did, a text notification from that morning caught my eye. I cleared it immediately, reminding myself that I’d already shared the photos with the sender, and as I set my phone down and closed my eyes, I chastised myself for not just sharing the full album on Google Photos with everyone who asked. That would

My eyes sprang open. The search wasn’t over yet.

Opening Google Photos, I typed October 2015 into the search bar. A part of me knew I was setting myself up for further disappointment, but another part suddenly recalled the scene: wooden board on my lap, sitting on the edge of the couch late at night, I scribbled out compliments in pencil on Ryan’s paper. Then, too late to loudly scan in an otherwise quiet house but certain I would want to reread her words, I withdrew my iPhone 6S and snapped a photo of her piece, preserving it, I thought then. That was the theory, anyway.

If true, I would still have that photo.

I rarely, if ever, delete photos. On this very phone, I can still scroll back to the first one I took during AVID in 2010. Maybe, just maybe, the story I had just played out wasn’t grasping at fictional straws but outlining a memory. Short of awkwardly contacting the writer, this was my final chance.

It took forever for a month’s worth of photos to load. I scrolled down from Halloween to the 1st, waiting several times for the hundreds of photos, screenshots, and videos to populate. I started from the bottom up, seeing younger faces of now-close friends, an empty house gradually fill with furniture, and my still round face and bald head mock me.

But I swallowed the soda bomb of mixed memories without letting my tongue taste anything. I was looking for not faces but cold, sterile text on white paper. Not expecting much, as I approached mid-month, I slowed my scrolling and held my breath.

Play in the Black Box. Dinner at Five Guys. Empty desk. Assembled bookshelves. Full moon. Visit from Yoselin. Mathletes Meet at Cosumnes Oaks.

I passed event after event, ignoring colorful faces and abundant joy in search of words.

On the ninth gentle scroll, I saw pencil marks. I recognized my handwriting. One final nudge and I saw it, straddling Monday, October 12th and Tuesday, October 13th. I knew I’d done it immediately, but I tapped on the still shot just to be sure. There, in the corner, I read it:

Ryan K
Period 2

Her words followed.

I whooped, the same elation I expressed during the Minneapolis Miracle. Welcome to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, I thought from my bed.

After starring it, screenshotting it, downloading it, converting it to a PDF, and emailing it to myself, I collapsed with relief. But suddenly, too awake to sleep, I decided to complete my journey and read Ryan’s words once more.

“Atop a gleaming white shelf…”

You know that I cried again. This time, though, it owed not just to Ryan’s magical prose but the existential relief of finding something precious that had been lost.

My contribution sat at the bottom, right next to “375 words”. In handwriting only slightly sharper than mine today, I wrote a paragraph that stretched onto the back, but it was my first sentence that mattered.

“This is the best statement I have ever read.”

Some things change across eight years.

Some don’t.

*****

Every year that we’ve hosted a Challenge Day or Diamond Day since 2016, I’ve worn a patch on my left arm with the initials JW.

That fall, when I covered the addition out of pocket, I didn’t have to explain what they stood for. Everyone knew Joe Walker; his death sat fresh in many minds long after his memorial service on the baseball field had ended.

In 2019, when Courtney chose a golden rod shirt for our team, those initials were still there—the same sleeve and everything. But we had a freshman who joined the leader team for the winter. One day, they asked me.

“What’s JW mean?”

Before that innocent question, I took the endurance of institutional memory for granted. Because I remembered Joe and always would, I forgot that those around me could not. I wasn’t naive to the annual quarter-churn of students at a high school, but I underestimated that churn’s power of erasure: through no negligence or ill intent, Joe morphed from a charismatic bearded southpaw to a shadow. By the fall of 2020, not one student attended our school who’d spent a day on campus with Joe.

Katelyn died in April 2018, so her date arrived in August 2021. From then on, only staff members would have shared a classroom with her. This reality brings an intense dissonance: this person who stands so prominently in my heart became invisible to the immediate world around me. It’s lonely, for one, and it’s also terrifying. To keep moving forward is remarkable; to see no visible traces of that original heartbreak is itself heartbreaking. It’s bad enough for the world to lose Joe or Katelyn, but for its people to not even realize that loss happened twists me up.

This sensation inspires a sense of custodianship in me. It’s not that I want to resurrect them or demand the student body know them, but I feel a responsibility to share that invisible history. For the past two years, I’ve taken my senior classes to the Memorial Garden to grant them access to Joe’s and Katelyn’s enduring physical forms on campus: a pair of trees. By briefly discussing them but their absence at length, I bridge the fading past with the blissfully ignorant future. If I don’t do it, no one else will. Someday, I might be the final person on campus who knew either. It’s up to me.

To discover that same sense of duty to Ryan’s personal statement surprised me. There’s a massive chasm between 375 words and a literal life, but responsibility umbrellas both. Ryan handed me that document in 2015 to lend her my insight, not to guard it like the Mona Lisa; I suspect its survival would carry little meaning to Ryan relative to mine. But that insignificant sheet of paper affected me; it changed and inspired me. It started me on this path toward the present, where I’m writing regularly and teaching a class about the subject. It has a legacy.

If it’s not me guarding that, then who?

A Google search confirms that Ryan has gone on to bigger things than drafting college essays, but that early edition of her affected me. I’ve spoken to her words, but not every lesson she taught me. So much came before that essay, and so much came after it across only two short years. I have a unique perspective on that one iteration of her, and that legendary collection of 375 words will always evoke everything else for me, too. Should she ever seek out a re-connection with her past, I want to be her heroic historian and deliver an essential artifact from that period without needing a reverse image search—that’s the one concrete way I can honor her and demonstrate that I actually did care. That I always did.

That essay is my way of literalizing what Ryan gave me, incidentally, seven and eight years ago. I embrace the challenge of living up to those gifts and hopefully replicating that process over and over with new individuals as time passes.

The happy ending with Ryan’s words isn’t universal, though. While hunting out hers, I also chased after Nate’s first PIQ essay. I noticed him working on it a day or two before the application deadline, and I offered to help. He shared that first draft as a Google Doc titled “Nathan Fav subject Essay”, and I read it that afternoon. I always bring it up: he pasted in a number with hundreds of thousands of digits at the end to reinforce his interest inspired by a Numberphile video. That number counted as one word. It’s brilliant.

But he shared that draft from his school account, and student accounts get wiped one month after graduation. That essay is truly lost media, inaccessible forever by either party, and that loss hurts me. Not only was it a playful piece of writing that authentically conveyed curiosity and cleverness, but it unexpectedly formed the foundation of our relationship. Inspired by my investment, he and Bria gave an entire night to revising my Teacher of the Year essays with me—using the precise principles I’m teaching this week—and then spent months doing the same for Sweet Appeal.

That I will never read his essay from the future and marvel at everything it led to disappoints me. I can’t help but picture myself, hunched over a laptop on November 30, 2016, as the sound mixer on Angels of Passion, tossing the “Ulterior Motives” cassette into the trash with an empty Mountain Dew. Catchy tune, he thought with a shrug. He couldn’t know what that decision would spawn any more than I could.

If it’s between the origins and the outcomes, I know I’ve won the exchange. I wouldn’t have traded my growth for Ryan’s personal statement paper, and I definitely wouldn’t swap years of friendship and support for Nate’s hastily typed words, either. But that doesn’t preclude me from feeling that pull to honor them. And I can’t honor them if they’re gone.

The number of YouTube channels centering their schtick on the Backrooms is vast. One of them, belonging to a creator named Broogli, published a comprehensive overview of the discovery a few days ago. At the end, he commented on how fantastic the Hobby Town USA store owners have been in the wake of learning about the community’s bizarre fascination with photos they took twenty years ago. About them, Broogli says:

I mean, they literally took the picture that changed YouTube, that changed the creepypasta genre, that changed my life. One single picture led to millions of views, millions of fans of a giant creepypasta—that one picture did all that. And I just, I just have to say thank you. Thank you so much.

I, too, feel gratitude to those who drafted these pivotal pieces, but I can’t stop where Broogli does. Gratitude has a place, so you know I’ll find a way to share this piece with Ryan and point it out to a very busy Nate, but that won’t be the only outcome of my protectiveness toward these artifacts.

When the PIQs class ends on Friday, everyone will have shared their drafts with me from their school accounts. Painstakingly, one by one, I will download each essay to my USB drive and back them up at home.

Odds are, I’ll never get a message from any of them nine years down the road seeking out their lost words. It’s unlikely these files will ever matter to the future people they propel present versions toward. I get that; I really do. But nobody would have ever thought renovation photos from 2003 would have people exalting in 2024, would they?

Besides, they might never reach out to me, but with their words safely in tow, I could one day reach out to one of them. From a digital nowhere, they’d get a message from an irrelevant former teacher that says, “This’ll sound weird, but your old personal statement still means a lot to me,” and, well, I’d like to think that will mean something. I’m not sure what, but hopefully, it’ll be something good. Hopefully, they’ll want to read it once more, too.

It’s a strange mindset, I grant you, but it’s an optimistic one.

I’m glad to have found it.

---

I’m scheduling this post twelve hours before the final day of the writing class and 36 hours after hearing back from Ryan! This has been an exhausting week, but it has also been a special one. I’ve never played the Backrooms game, but I have to imagine that no level feels like this.

Thanks for reading my words.