1-Did you rewrite your personal essay?
Completely and totally. There were way too many changes in my life between last year and this year and I wanted my personal statement to reflect that somewhat.
2-Did you rewrite all of your secondary essays?
or
3-Did you basically keep your essays and just tweak them a bit (personal and secondary)?
I mostly rewrote my secondary essays. I only reapplied to two of the same schools. One of those schools did not require essays and the other (Pritzker) had similar questions, but as I said, my life changed, so... My secondary essays changed too, to reflect my new take on a lot of things in life. However, I did recycle them between schools if the questions were similar enough. It gets tedious writing the same thing over and over from scratch, as you know 😉
The essays and stuff were definitely not the only thing about my app that changed. I have more volunteer experiences, leadership experience, and research experience, and my GPA is higher. I didn't retake the MCAT because I could not imagine being in that dungeon again for 9 hours. I only used 3 of the same LORs from last year to this year-- the rest are different. I also applied to DO schools this year, which I did not last year.
Good luck. And keep your optimism up. I should probably follow my own advice on that 😉