The register problem: technical prose versus literary prose by t_winkler

I've written user documentation for fifteen years. I know what that has done to my sentences. It has made them correct, complete, and almost completely without atmosphere. They deliver information efficiently and then stop. That is exactly what good technical writing should do and it is a disaster for the kind of essay I'm trying to write now. The essay I'm working on is about what it costs to spend your professional life making things legible to people who don't want to engage with them seriously. There's irony in the fact that the prose I've trained myself to write is itself the subject of the essay. I'm using a compromised instrument to describe the nature of the compromise. I've been trying various things. Reading aloud helps. Reading Joan Didion and then immediately writing something, riding the rhythm before it fades. Spending time in the diary before I go near the essay. But I keep finding my sentences snapping back into documentation mode when I'm not watching them. I'm curious whether anyone else has fought a professional register to write something personal. How long did it take? Did it ever fully resolve?