Tiffany Shearer
Self-Assessment
The writing process….I think for days before I start writing. I have to have the perfect idea and set up. I need to know exactly what I am going to write and how I am going to go about writing it. Once I get my idea, I start writing and then I don’t stop until I feel like I am completely done! Then, I walk into class with my rough draft that smells, feels, tastes, and looks like a final draft. I am all prepared and feel like there couldn’t be even a sentence changed in my essay. Finally, it is the moment of truth! Mr. Jennings walks over to me. It is time to show him my masterpiece! He scans through my paper and then completely blows my mind! He wants me to take my paper apart! He wants me to take my finished, glorious paper apart and rearrange it! He actually wants me to change not just a sentence, but a paragraph -- a whole paragraph! He even tells me to totally get rid of a paragraph. How could I possibly take apart my paper and then piece it back together! I write my essays to be like puzzles. They can only be put together one way and one way only. If you take a piece out of my essay, in my OCD mind, the paper no longer flows.
I always thought my organization was my strongest aspect, but now I don’t know. In this class it seems to be my weakest.
I go home and tear my hair out as I make myself delete pieces of my puzzle. This is the worst for a person who is OCD. To me, this writing process is devoid of structure. I am the kind of person who strives on structure and order. My first step in writing hasalways been to make my writing process structured and that was always what I have done, but now he wants me to ignore all that I have ever known. I would rather rewrite an entire paper than change around what I have already done. When I rearrange and disregard parts of my paper, it never truly feels done. Think of how you would feel if you spent hours putting together a 2,000 piece puzzle and then, out of nowhere, your dog runs through the room and messes up the whole puzzle and starts chewing on a few of the piece while you are gone. You come home to find the puzzle in a heap on the floor with absolutely no order. When you try to put it back together, you find that some of the pieces are missing!
I sit in my room in utter despair with my laptop rested on my lap. I want to just quit and turn in my original copy, but now I know better. I know I need to change. I know I need to overcome the same process and method that has consumed me for my whole life as a writer. So, as I sit there on my bed, I delete parts of my essay. At first it is just a word or two, and then I start deleting and rearranging sentences, soon even paragraphs. It takes all my power to do thi,s and I am close to tears. This may seem crazy to some other people, but to me doing this, taking away all the structure and order is the worst feeling. Soon, I start to feel better. I start to feel the control and the structure come back because now instead of my essay always being in control of me, I am in control of it and from there the words flowed onto the page. I realize that now I am the master of my essay and I am slaying the monster that was the OCD, organization and structure that had control of me for so long.
Time and time again I have to continue to reassure myself that taking away the organization is the right process for me even though it doesn’t feel like it. I still struggle fighting the monster, but after you have slayed it once, you learn the right methods and tactics to slay it again. Soon it becomes easier and easier. Now, Instead of thinking of my essays as a puzzle, I think of them as a Rubik’s cube. This is still a puzzle, but there are so many different ways to get to the end product, and you can continue to manipulate till you finally get the outcome you want. Even though sometimes it takes forever and feels like you will never finish, if you try hard enough and even totally change your ways of thinking, you can succeed. This semester I have slayed the beast and turned my simple, structured puzzle, into a more easily manipulated Rubik’s cube.