Reflection on short essay writing process

This short essay was the first paper I've written in several years. True to my history of writing anxiety, I found myself putting off working on the paper, and dreading it more and more. I think what finally got me to stop procrastinating and tackle the paper was realizing how important succeeding in this class is to my future. To succeed in college, I have to crank out papers, and that starts with this writing class. Since this wasn't a research paper, I just sat down and tried to write my stream of consciousness about my topic without worrying about the best choice of words to express my thoughts, or the best way to organize them. It's very difficult to silence my obnoxious inner critic, but I just kept trying, and eventually I got a paper out. It was good to know it didn't have to be good when it was just a draft for the peer review. Later, when I revised it, I made some pretty big changes. I find revising my own work to be a very difficult process, because it's hard for me to see my work with fresh eyes, and imagine how I could change it to make it better. I asked my friend who's a high school English teacher to read it and give me some feedback. This helped me get some new ideas of ways to improve it. All in all, I can say this in response to my essay writing process: Writing is really fucking hard and I'd rather have dental surgery.