Today, write about a trip you took that turned out significantly differently than you’d planned. That could be because everything went wrong, or because you had an expectation of what the trip was going to be like and it either didn’t measure up or it way over-delivered, or because nothing went as planned and that turned out to be the best thing ever.
Once you get it all out, connect the events in this story to something bigger than you, something more universal or something that you wish were true. After all, we can write personal essays all we want (and indeed there is nothing wrong with a personal essay) but we are here to write for impact, and the way to be impactful with our writing is to make it bigger than ourselves.