In my midterm essay, I discussed belle hooks’ essay, “Is Paris Burning?” where she discusses 1990s ballroom culture, particularly through the lens of the documentary, “Paris is Burning”. In my essay, I made an argument for the idea that hooks’ is using her essay as a call to action to queer people of color to stop fixating on fitting into a “box” within the cis-heteronormative idea of gender and reject the boxes of the gender binary as a whole. I think my strengths when I was writing this essay were my analysis skills, my allowance of imperfection when first writing, and my formatting. I usually am able to recognize a thematic concept in a piece of writing easily and write the most when I first begin an essay, without worrying about it being perfect. I struggled with being concise because I had a lot of thoughts and wanted to make sure the ones I included were efficient in improving my claim. I also desire to be better at expressing my thoughts accurately. While I find a strength in analysis, putting my feelings and understandings on paper tends to be an area of difficulty for me and some of the nuances that I feel in a situation can get lost in translation. I also feel like if I could express my feelings more accurately, I would have better communication of my point to the reader.