My AP English teacher assigned us to write our own obituaries. I wrote mine in twenty minutes and handed it in. She handed it back with one comment: 'This is a resume, not a life.'

I had written about my GPA, my extracurriculars, my intended major. I had written the way I had been trained to present myself — as a list of achievements moving in a forward direction. My teacher's comment sat with me for three weeks. Then I rewrote it.

The second version was harder to write and, I think, more true. It included the year I stopped talking to my best friend over something I can no longer fully reconstruct. It included the afternoon I spent in my car in a parking lot because I didn't want to go home and I didn't want to go anywhere else. It included the specific way my younger sister laughs when she thinks something is genuinely funny, which is one of my favorite sounds and something no achievement unlocks.

What the second obituary taught me was the difference between a life that looks good and a life that feels real. The first version was the version I had been optimizing for — legible, impressive, forward-moving. The second version had texture. It had things that didn't resolve. It had the parking lot.

I don't think these are opposites. I want a life that is both — one that I can be proud of when summarized and one that I would actually recognize as mine when lived. But I needed my teacher's comment to understand that I had been building only one of them.

At Harvard, I want to study philosophy and literature together — not because I want to write about life, but because I want to think carefully about what a life is for. The obituary is still in my desk drawer. I reread it sometimes to remember what I'm actually building.