“I can’t find a way to balance storytelling, being informative, and showing enough positive aspects at myself all at the same time.”
College essay is a personal essay to show your humanity side(s) — it could be your vulnerability, curiosity, emotion, or an event/incident that affected you to make you become what you are. It is neither an instruction to a device (informative) nor an advertisement (sale pitch - put together enough positive aspects to convince the buyers). The purpose of the personal essay is to balance your other parts of the application where the numbers, awards, states, and list of activities that present you (cold facts), but you also want the people review your file see you as a person — warm, live, and soft. Think about your favorite movies; what make them great? Why you identify with the main character? Do the Superman, Rocky, and Spiderman always win the battle or being the strongest throughout the movie? Or do they fail and overcome and do something like every other human being would do, so you like them more? Anyway, its only 450 words to describe yourself, so concentrate on only one or two parts of yourself that you would like people to know and differ from any other applicants, and will make a strong impression to the admission officers. Yes, think about your essay as a movie. How would you write a movie about yourself.
For me, I like about Flashdance as an example. Yes, it has include love line, frustration, overcome, but the whole thing was all about dance, different forms, but very consistence. Some 30 years ago, but still gave me great impression.