Passionate

How do you manage to describe something you're really, really passionate about, without going above 250 words? Isn't it a contradiction in terms??? You should like this thing so much but you need to restrain yourself as far as how many words you use to describe it. Useless to say, I was not happy!! So, thanks to my beautiful editors, who helped me first collect my thoughts (Grazie Chiara!), then write them in proper English (Thanks K!), and then to cut through those extra 500 words I was supposed to cut out (Cielo, as usual, an angel!). Here's the result: one of my business school essays. :) (And, yes, I have decided to go for an MBA. My bridges are making me impossibly unhappy, and I am contemplating switching career and become a corporate bitch. If I can't like my job, at least it should pay me ridiculously well, don't you think?)

1: Describe something you feel passionate about. (250-word maximum)

I cannot recall a time in my life that is not associated with a book. Reading has always been my passion. I learned how to read at age 3, and I have never stopped. Throughout my childhood, Mickey Mouse comic strips and stories of princesses and dragons enchanted me; thriller stories and impossible romances decorated my adolescence; and, in my early twenties, I became acquainted with classical Italian and foreign writers. I have since discovered contemporary literature and the beauty of reading in the original language, and my reading pleasure now resides in the sheer artistry of the words.

Finding one good book is as difficult as finding the time to spend with it. Reading is an activity that is hardly compatible with the frantic paced life I lead. It requires you to surrender your world to it and to demonstrate the willingness to be taken some place else. It replaces your normal rhythm with a new idea of time, of pauses, of rapidity. If there is one thing that always amazes me, it is the ability books have to kidnap my time and give it back transformed.

I have grown up with books, and I love and cherish each one of them as the custodian of a specific mood, a piece of myself, as if they were pictures of me taken at different times. The books I read describe my path, how I have changed, who I have become.