The meme of our time is that only the wounded wind up doing anything significant in their careers. A miserable childhood is assumed to be prerequisite to success.
The book "It's All About the Dress" might deep-six that line of thinking. In it, international clothes designer Vicky Tiel recounts a conventional but happy childhood in a suburb in Maryland. The only trauma - and it wasn't all that disruptive - was her parent's divorce.
Yet, she achieves success quickly in Paris fashion, soon after she graduated from Parsons. Usually that kind of story would have been one of early peaking and then equally early failure and going self-destructive through booze and other addictive activities. Not so for Tiel. She didn't miss a beat in her branding and is still in demand although in her 50s. Her love life had its ups and downs but we ambitious folks don't care much about that, do we.
Therefore, those intending to apply for that plums which require a personal essay no longer have to devote a paragraph to overcoming early adversity.
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