"Write About What Makes You YOU"

Why vague essay advice fails — and what narrative identity research says actually helps teens find their voice.

Ask Dr. Emily Wassell 

Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a version of Alice in Wonderland where the Caterpillar asks "Who are you?" and Alice, instead of spiraling into existential confusion, calmly opens a laptop and writes 650 words about it by a deadline. That version does not exist, because even Lewis Carroll understood that "who are you?" is one of the cruelest questions you can ask someone mid-transformation. Alice's honest answer — "I hardly know, sir, just at present" — is, if we're honest, the most truthful college essay opening line ever written. No admissions officer would accept it. But it's correct.

I think about Alice every August, because "write about what makes you YOU" is the advice I hear given to nearly every rising senior, usually by a well-meaning adult who has never had to write the essay themselves. It sounds supportive. It sounds like permission. In practice, it is one of the least useful sentences you can say to a seventeen-year-old holding a blank document, and here's the research that explains why.

The Problem: You're Asking for an Answer to a Question That Doesn't Have One Yet

Here's the uncomfortable developmental truth underneath the college essay: most seventeen-year-olds do not yet have a stable, fully-formed identity to report on. This isn't a flaw in your particular teenager. It's the actual, well-documented architecture of adolescence.

Erik Erikson, whose stage theory still anchors much of developmental psychology, named adolescence the stage of identity versus role confusion — the period where a person is actively constructing a sense of self, not retrieving one from storage. Asking a teenager to "write about what makes you YOU" assumes identity is a finished object sitting in a drawer, waiting to be described. Developmentally, that's backwards. Identity at seventeen is closer to a piece still on the loom.

This is why the advice fails in such a specific, recognizable way. Faced with an impossible retrieval task, most teens do one of two things: they freeze completely, or they reach for the nearest pre-packaged narrative — the mission trip, the injury comeback, the grandmother's illness — because at least it's a story that exists, even if it isn't really theirs. Admissions readers see thousands of these essays every year precisely because "write about what makes you YOU" sends almost every anxious teenager toward the same three plots.

What Narrative Identity Research Actually Says

Psychologist Dan McAdams has spent much of his career studying what he calls narrative identity — the theory that we don't simply have an identity, we construct one, continuously, by telling ourselves stories about our own experiences. Identity, in this model, isn't a fact to be reported. It's an act of authorship.

This reframe matters enormously for how we should actually help a teenager approach the essay. If identity is authored rather than retrieved, then the task was never "report who you are." The task is closer to: notice a moment, examine it honestly, and see what it reveals that you didn't already know you believed.

McAdams' research also identifies something called redemptive sequences — a narrative pattern where a difficult or negative experience leads to psychological growth or positive meaning — and finds that people who naturally construct their life stories this way tend to show higher levels of wellbeing and generativity. This is not a coincidence that admissions essays reward growth narratives. It's that growth narratives are genuinely how healthy identity development gets processed and communicated — which is exactly why a manufactured one, bolted onto an experience that didn't actually produce insight, reads as hollow. Admissions officers aren't detecting insincerity through some mystical instinct. They're detecting the absence of a mechanism that real narrative identity construction requires: actual reflection.

Why "What Makes You YOU" Backfires, Specifically

Three things happen, predictably, when a teenager is handed that prompt cold:

1. It triggers evaluation anxiety instead of reflection. The moment "what makes you YOU" becomes a task with a due date and a judge, the brain shifts into performance mode. Performance mode is terrible for the kind of loose, associative thinking that actually produces insight. This is well-supported by research on evaluative pressure and creative cognition — the same reason you've never had your best idea while someone is standing over your shoulder watching you think.

2. It has no starting point. "What makes you you" is a question about the whole self, all at once. The human mind does not process the whole self well as a single unit — narrative identity is built from specific remembered episodes, not from abstract self-summary. Asking for the abstract summary first is asking someone to skip the actual cognitive process and jump straight to the conclusion.

3. It invites comparison instead of specificity. Faced with an impossible question, teenagers do what anyone does: they look around. What are other people writing about? What sounds impressive? This is where the mission trip essay comes from — not dishonesty, but the very reasonable human instinct to reach for a socially legible answer when no personally legible one is available yet.

What Actually Works: Episode Before Essence

If narrative identity is built from specific remembered moments rather than retrieved as a finished self-summary, then the actual starting point isn't "who are you" at all. It's much smaller, much stranger, and much more useful:

"Tell me about a time you changed your mind about something." "Tell me about something you do that no one taught you to do." "Tell me about a moment you were more annoyed than the situation warranted, and why." "Tell me about a rule you secretly think is wrong."

None of these questions ask for identity. They ask for a single, specific, low-stakes episode. And this is exactly where McAdams' research says identity actually lives — not in the summary, but in the particular, textured moment. The insight — the "what this reveals about me" — isn't supposed to be known in advance. It's supposed to surface during the telling, which is why forcing a teenager to state their thesis before they've told the story backwards the entire process.

In practice, I ask students to talk before they write. Voice memos work well here, precisely because speech is lower-stakes than a blank document and doesn't invite the same self-editing pressure. I'll ask one of the questions above, let them ramble for five unstructured minutes, and almost every time, somewhere in minute three, they say something they didn't know they believed until they heard themselves say it. That sentence — not the polished essay it eventually becomes — is usually the actual answer to "what makes you you." It just couldn't be reached by being asked directly.

The Alice Principle

"I hardly know, sir, just at present" isn't a failure to answer the Caterpillar's question. It's the most honest thing a person mid-transformation can say. The work of the college essay was never to resolve that uncertainty into a tidy 650-word conclusion. It's to take one real, specific moment of falling down a rabbit hole and examine it closely enough that something true — small, particular, genuinely theirs — climbs back out.

That's not a lower bar than "write about what makes you you." It's the only version of that question a seventeen-year-old can actually answer honestly.

If your teen is staring at a blank document because "just write about yourself" isn't working — it's not a writing problem, and it's not a confidence problem either. It's that they've been asked the wrong-shaped question. I'd love to help find the right one. I have a few spots open before senior year begins.

Sources referenced:

• Erikson, E. — Identity versus role confusion, stages of psychosocial development

• McAdams, D. P. — Narrative identity theory and redemptive sequences