Research has indicated that students experience negative reactions to their placement in a basic writing course. Despite negative disposition toward basic writing, self-placement practices have become commonplace in higher education for advancing equity. Using the concept of "Possible Academic Selves," this article examines student writing produced in a placement process to challenge the neutrality of self-placement into a basic writing course. As statistical and textual analysis of student writing reveals, placement in a basic writing course could be viewed as a disruption to a student's Possible Academic Self, or the student they imagined they would be in college. Analyzing student placement challenge writing in this light, as well as considering the long history of the basic writer as "other," reveals the disruptions that can occur to a student's sense of self, complicating the nature of writing placement processes that rely on students to make choices about their own course placement.