Welcome to Argus Apps: Opinion’s new column where we publish Wesleyan students’ Common App essays!

The Opinion section created the column “Argus Apps” to humanize the college process. Often, we forget that there are people behind Common App essays with real emotions and experiences. These essays are also always looked at within the framework of the college admissions process, so to publish these essays without pairing them with someone’s SAT score and a list of extracurriculars is a rare opportunity to look at them as personal stories. We hope you enjoy reading Argus Apps! If you’re interested in submitting your own Common App essay, please email Sophie Jager (sjager@wesleyan.edu) and Zara Skolnik (zskolnik@wesleyan.edu).

Nate Wheeler – Common App Personal Essay
The One Who Tells My Story, January 2021

The football field is drenched with rain as the floodlights and countless pairs of eyes converge on me. I look out at the crowd and begin to speak. 

I wouldn’t describe myself as an activist. Maybe I had general sentiments when I was younger, but those were long gone after my worldview was shattered. Five years earlier, my younger brother, Ben, had been killed in his classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I was nine years old, and since that time, the public had looked at me like they wanted some generation-defining speech to fall out of my mouth. It made me angry every time I felt that pressure.

Every anniversary is both mourned and celebrated as a milestone. During this one, the fifth anniversary, a local organization (The Newtown Action Alliance) had planned a gun violence prevention vigil where people were scheduled to speak, including my peers.

I was asked to speak.

I had rarely talked to anyone outside my family about Ben. I would tell people how great he was, but I had never said anything publicly about how his death affected me. I heard, “Why wouldn’t you want to open up to people? It’ll make you feel better.”  I considered that; I did. Then when I did, I regretted it for months.

I’d never spoken publicly about what happened to Ben because I was uncomfortable with peoples’ reactions. The moment you bring up Sandy Hook, people get teary-eyed. While I appreciated their empathy, their emotions often felt forced to me. It got to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between someone complimenting me because I deserved it and someone feeling obligated not to hurt my feelings because my brother was dead. 

But at that moment, when the floodlights hit, none of that mattered. At that moment, I was an activist… and it felt good. When I spoke, I even ad-libbed a bit, but it didn’t matter because it fit well with everything I had written. 

I think I can do this again, I thought, I could do this more often.

When the vigil ended, I felt the energy from my speech lift me for the rest of the night. I went to bed, satisfied with what I had done.

The next morning, when my parents showed me a news article about the vigil, I saw it: a picture of me. Then almost every media piece after that seemed to feature me as some poster-child-epic-speechmaker for gun violence prevention.  All the articles had placed me in this role of “vengeful brother super-activist.” One news clip even called me a “huge advocate.”  Why had they not focused on my peers as equally? Why did I have to be the focus of the story? What’s worse, I had been spun to be this person I wasn’t; someone the public should pity. I agreed with everything the speakers were articulating, but I was just one person who wanted to share my truth. I didn’t want to be the center of this spotlight, and all it did was make me feel vulnerable and exposed.

No one else can tell me what my life means. That’s my job. I have no idea what is ahead for me, but I must be the one who tells my story because I’m the one who is living it. The narrative of my own life can only have one author, and I have seen how fragile the control of that narrative can be. Others will try to step in and write a chapter or two—it can’t be helped—but it’s not me, and it never will be. I know too well that every day is one of uncertainty, and I will never know what to expect, but I will work as hard as I must to make sure the story people know of me is the one that I tell.

Nate Wheeler can be reached at nwheeler@wesleyan.edu.