A growing body of writing research suggests college students’ and teachers’ conceptualizations of writing play an important role in learning to write and making the transition from secondary to post-secondary academic composition. First-year college writers are not blank slates; rather, they bring many assumptions and beliefs about academic writing to the first-year writing classroom from exposure to a wide range of literate practices throughout their lives. Metaphor acts as a way for scholars to trace students’ as well as their instructors’ assumptions and beliefs about writing. In this study, I contend that metaphor is a pathway to meta-cognitive awareness, mindfulness, and reflection. This multi-method descriptive study applies metaphor analysis to a corpus of more than a dozen first-year composition students’ endof-semester writing portfolios; the study also employs an auto-ethnographic approach to examining this author’s texts composed as a graduate student and novice teacher. In several cases writing students in this study appeared to reconfigure their metaphors for writing and subsequently reconsider their assumptions about writing. My literature review and analysis suggests that metaphor remains an underutilized inventive and reflective strategy in composition pedagogy. Based on these results, I suggest that instructors consider how metaphoric competence might offer writers and writing instructors an alternate means for operationalizing key habits of mind such as meta-cognitive awareness, reflection, openness to learning, and creativity as recommended in the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing. Ultimately, I argue that writers and teachers might benefit from adopting a more flexible attitude towards metaphor. As a rhetorical trope, metaphors are contextual and, thus, writers need to learn to mix, discard, create, and obscure metaphors as required by the situation.