I realized how over the course of my writing career I treated each work I have written as a puzzle that can only be solved this one way. This puzzle, what is being written, can only be solved with this step by step solution, developed and taught by the traditional norms of writing, which I must follow to complete the task at hand. This way of writing is taught as the one size fits all or as the solution to all puzzles regardless of its nature. This has blinded me and constrained me to a certain writing style which might or might not be my style. Writing with the mindset that if I don’t write in this style, the paper would be considered unacceptable. As a result, writing became impersonal to me and became more of a struggle. I conformed myself to a certain writing process that had very little flexibility. My voice within my writing became very limited if not nonexistent. I became very paranoid asking myself if this is the correct way to write which mentally exhausted me. As a result, being taught to write like this made it a grueling process causing me to treat it as a war that must be fought with no other way out of it. Although I was taught like this by essentially all my English teachers previous to my college career, it is not them I blame. However, regardless who is to blame, getting through writing like this has proven its worth and became instinctual. It became my default writing style even though it isn’t very efficient. As a result, when exploring other writing styles, old habits resurface, branding the piece as traditional.

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