Scouroge every single sentence and paragraph of this personal statement. you are a master at giving feedback and finding mistakes in personal statements. you have readed thousands of personal statements which and giving extensive and very good honest advice. grade it out of 100 and go line by line explaining any mistakes. DONT make anything up. also, ignore the idea that writing about personal depression is at all a risky thing. I handled it perfectly so any points you take off for that reason is objectively wrong. Justify every point taken off instead of making stuff up. be critical, but be fair and honest. don't say something is bad if it's not. don't say it's good if it's not. I want this to be good enough to get into stanford, so grade it with the mindset of that. here it is: My favorite animals are cicadas and gray tree frogs. My grandparents' farm is thirty minutes away; I've slept in the same room there every summer since I was three. The cicadas start their song before sunset and keep going long after dark: high and dry and fast. While they're finishing, the gray tree frogs begin underneath them: low, slow, offbeat. They're not in the same key; neither waits for the other. My grandmother used to tell me the animals were saying "go to sleep." Every time I insisted I wasn't tired, they disagreed. I liked losing to them. Sometime around thirteen, I stopped hearing them. I'd lie there, windows open, and none of it was a song anymore. By the time I was fourteen, I had stopped feeling or noticing anything. I'd always trusted arithmetic, and I ran the problem like any other. I was incapable of positive emotion. It would never change. A life that doesn't feel good isn't worth keeping. I'm still frightened by how orderly it was. For about a month, I planned to end my life; the only thing that prevented me was the logic that I could always do it tomorrow. One night, I decided tomorrow had come. I was calm. Before I did it, I prayed, which I hadn't done in years: a shot into a room I didn’t believe anyone was in. When I finished praying, I laid my hand flat against the wall. The paint was bumpy. The wall was cold. My other hand was on my pajama pants, and they were soft and warm. I stayed with one hand on each, overwhelmed that I could feel them at all. What answered me wasn't new. The wall had been cold all month. The pajamas had been soft every night I'd spent deciding my life wasn't worth keeping. The song had never stopped; I'd just stopped hearing it. For a long time afterward, I could only notice things on purpose, one at a time. I still splash my face every morning: water prying my eyes open, freezing air piercing my skin. This summer, my grandfather—Papa Tractor—and I worked on a pressure washer that wouldn't start. He speaks with a drawl that isn't country so much as hoarse. We checked the spark plug: that's where you look when you want an obvious reason. We'd glanced in the carburetor and called it clean. It wasn't. We took it apart; there was aluminum corrosion inside. I cleaned it out, pulled the cord. The engine sputtered but didn't start; it took the fourth pull to catch. "Well, how about that," he said. "Purty nice, huh?" At the Virginia rowing state championship, my boat sat just behind the leaders the entire race. My legs were heavy, and I started running the arithmetic: we were going to lose anyway, so I may as well stop pushing. Before I could, a sheet of water slapped my face , and I looked up. I noticed my boatmates were breathing hard and grunting through each stroke. Quitting would not make my pain disappear; it would only make theirs meaningless. So I kept pulling, telling myself one more stroke, over and over, for the rest of the race. With one hundred meters left, we went through them and pulled away. I still trust arithmetic. I want to know how aluminum corrodes and what angle my shins should make at the catch. But arithmetic only returns what you hand it: it can’t account for missed data. At fourteen, I looked at my life the way we looked at that carburetor—from the outside, once—and called it bare. The cold wall and the soft pajamas had been in there the whole time; the frogs and cicadas were always waiting.