Pen tool becoming add vertex tool very far away from line

Hi there, I'm trying to trace some text in After Effects for a dumb effect and I cannot draw this line without the pen tool becoming the "add vertex" tool anytime my mouse gets anywhere close to the line I am drawing. But I'm not trying to add new vertex's in the middle of the existing line, I'm trying to extend the line. In the screenshot, my mouse doesn't show up, but I'm trying to place a new point at the beginning of the U. After Effects is instead turning my mouse into the "add vertex" tool and trying to add a point in the middle of the line next to my mouse. Pressing Command or Control does not fix it, nor does pressing G to take me back to the pen tool—it just switches between the subtract vertext and feather tool, which are both equally useless. Is there a way to turn this off, or make it's range lower?

I'm on a 2014 16" Macbook Pro running MacOS 11.01 and my version of after effects is 17.5 (2020).

P.S. if anyone knows a better way to do this "handwritten text" effect than tracing the text and making an alpha matte with it, please let me know, because doing it this way is annoying and does not look very good.