Distinctive

By Victoria Tillson Evans, Ph.D.

To tell a story is hard. Or is it, a story is hard to tell? Or maybe, hard it is to tell a story? These variations on the same theme reveal the difficulties you face when trying to write, let alone trying to develop your college essays. Where do you start, or more importantly, what do you emphasize? Most people think it’s the beginning. While that’s the simplest answer, it isn’t always the best one. Sometimes it makes sense to start in the middle or, even surprisingly, at the end. To answer this question, it’s often wise to think about where you find your story’s meaning.

I once took the wrong train from Prague in the Czech Republic to Krakow, Poland and ended up in Warsaw, Poland instead. Now, I dare say that if I were to start this story from the beginning, i.e. from the moment my friends and I decided to visit the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, which lies just outside of Krakow, maybe that would be interesting. But what if I walked you through our trip planning, then took you on our journey through Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, including to the moment when we got to the Prague train station, then boarded the train, and then walked off it to find what can only be described as a city (at least outside of that station) that gives “Communist gloom dungeon?” You may not have the patience to wait for that revelation. Instead, this story is best started from the end, namely the moment we realized we traveled to the wrong city. The rest of the story can explain how we got there.

Yet, when you tell a story, the events you share and the sequence they follow can make a huge difference. Some of you can easily relay chronologically the most relevant moments that led to a big moment in your life, or even the moments following it that showed how you had changed as a person. You are very lucky to have that gift! Most people, however, cannot. I say this to point out that to tell a story is hard. Big moments stick with us, like shockingly arriving in Warsaw. But the smaller ones that precede and follow them, like the conversations that I had with my friends on the train or how we figured out how to get to Krakow, don’t. Yet, those details give those big moments texture and meaning, even though they often evade our memories. That’s why, in some cases, they need to be reconstructed with time and careful thought.

This discretion isn’t always obvious, and sometimes you need to say what doesn’t matter to get to the core of what does. I’m certain you wouldn’t care about what we did in Vienna or Innsbruck, or about what I ate in Budapest. These stops along the way have no bearing on taking the wrong train to Warsaw. Nor does the value of my story rest in whether I remember exactly who was in my group traveling around Eastern Europe, or whether or not it was warm or cold on that fateful day. I would even bet that some of you have even already shrugged your shoulders at this story’s premise. So what if I took the wrong train? That’s why, if I actually want you to care about my story, I need you to know what kind of impact this misadventure had on me. That’s where my external and internal stories collide.

Up until this point, I have shared my external story. What happened. To tell that story was hard. But the reality is, I’ve barely even really told you about that day. I took a train. I got to Warsaw. I then realized I made a mistake. To make this story matter, I need to tell the real story, namely my internal story. Why it mattered. To tell that part of the story is even harder. To share my thoughts and feelings about the situation, and how it ultimately and forever altered my core values, will give the story shape and meaning. It will make my story interesting.

As you may or may not know, I am half Jewish, half Christian, though my family was not at all religious as I was growing up. By the time I decided to travel to Auschwitz with my friends, I’d only read Bible passages to decipher medieval and Renaissance paintings for my Art History degree, and celebrated high holidays with family as a cultural rite of passage. The way I chose to connect with my Jewish side was through learning about the Holocaust. I took the courses “The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich” and “Italian Jewish Literature” while in college, and I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC probably more times than anyone else I know. If there was a book or a film about the Holocaust, I read or watched it. I even wrote a research paper on Dr. Mengele’s experiments on twins. The Holocaust was my connection to my Jewish heritage, and visiting Auschwitz, to me, felt like a pilgrimage to a site that connected me to 6,000,000 others who once shared my identity. Taking the wrong train meant I might have missed my chance to feel that connection, as I had only one day left on my trip before I had to travel back to Rome, where I was studying abroad, to meet my parents who coming to visit me.

So you can imagine my horror and panic when we walked out of the train station to find the colorless, Soviet architecture of Warsaw, 155 miles from our true destination. Would we be able to catch a train to Krakow that same day? How far off course had we gone? How much would that cost? I was a college student on a very limited budget.

Yet, this wrong turn, despite its difficulties, taught me a few things about myself. The biggest one is that I can survive traveling around countries where I don’t know the languages. This was the year 2000, long before we had smartphones and AI to translate Czech or Polish on the spot. Instead, my friends and I relied on our Lonely Planet guide’s glossary of “Useful Terms,” and hoped they were enough to get by on (obviously they were not)! No, we did not understand the signs in Prague nor the train conductor making announcements along our route. But in the end, we got it right. We found an authority at the Warsaw train station and just said, “Krakow,” letting them point us in the right direction before exchanging some dollars for enough zlotys to buy new tickets to our true destination.

More importantly, this experience taught me to be willing and ready to make huge mistakes, and to be okay with those mistakes when they happen. As a life-long perfectionist who has always liked everything to be “just so,” the degree of emotional flexibility this wrong train trip required was uncomfortable for me. Obviously, accidents happen, so I either I had to accept this situation and figure my way out of it, or get beaten by it and stay stuck in Warsaw. I was riddled with frustration and panic, but looking out on the foreboding landscape before me, I chose to accept it. We figured out a way to get to Krakow that same day, despite my (and others’) limited budget, and saw Auschwitz as planned. I may have been a little hungry the following day, since I ran out of money before taking the 12-hour-long train trip back to Rome, but when I got back there, my parents made sure they fed me. If I can survive those discomforts, certainly I could bounce back from other unexpected detours on my life’s journey. It turns out mistakes can actually be okay, normal, and dare I say, healthy.

Hard it is to tell a story. It’s only when you recognize that truth can you begin to tell it. My recommendation, however, is not to start with telling the entire external story, which seems to be the natural, go-to approach. Fixating on everything that happened chronologically often leads to boring stories that carry very little meaning or interest. Instead, focus on the one big moment that defined the external story, and from there, reconstruct your internal story. By doing that, the other necessary moments and their order will fall into place. Not only that, but you’ll also add intrigue and meaning, getting your readers more emotionally invested in your tale. Because if you think about it, you’re not really telling the story about the time you accidentally took the wrong train to Warsaw. You’re telling the story of how taking the wrong train shaped your character and made you a better person. If your reader is lucky, they can imagine that maybe one day a similar mistake will shape them, too.