Where is my voice?

Upon reflecting of my past essays, I have realized that despite this stressful road of assignments and due dates, my writing has improved greatly. Looking back, my writing was chaotic and just plain confusing. Majority of my sentences contained fragments, and don't even get me started on my incorrect usage of the semi-colon. Although even now, I understand that I have an even bigger journey ahead of me. 

Now my writing overall is not terrible, in fact throughout my middle school and early high school years, my teachers praised my essays; I was the star student. This was back when we had a freedom of writing. Typically, I prefer to write in a poetic voice; an outlining depiction of Edgar Allan Poe or Mark Twain. I enjoy using extensive vocabulary that allow my sentences to flow. It's almost as though I can picture the words floating off the page into a sea of stories; which eventually evaporates into the clouds and the cycle only continues to spread  But I quickly learned that my style of writing wasn't fit for AP courses. It was "too fluffy", not direct to the point, and often times the teachers I had simply hated imagination or style in essays. Needless to say, my 8th grade teacher killed my entire dream of wanting to be an author. I didn't care about getting marked down for "fragments" or grammar mistakes; I am a writer and writing is my control--I didn't understand why I should conform myself to a grading scale and limit my voice. And as a result, I lost my passion--which was my talent. In which case, my writing progressively diminished in quality. Now not to say that I was a perfect writer back then, I made several mistakes, but if I hadn't given up on my style a few years ago, I know I'd enjoy writing more than I do now. 

Though, I have come to the conclusion that I like how far I have in my academic journey of writing; it has most significantly improved. Although, I still need to work on in-class writing anxiety; often I will blank out during an essay and my writing turns into absolute garbage. But I have slowly improved on this skill. 
My main goal is to improve my essays to a 9 average marking, though I wouldn't mind getting back my dream of being an author again.