Me and my wonderful handwriting

I’ve spoken about my handwriting, in a previous post and kind of promised a blog entry about that, and here it is.

”The handwriting of a doctor!”, ”You will never write for a living.”, ”What have you written here?”, ”Did a bird jump around on this paper?”

All of the above statements, and many many more, have been thrown my way after people have seen my handwriting. I am the first to admit that my handwriting is not good. I do have some problems reading old notebooks and handwritten shopping lists (hence we now use digital, shared ones)

I have countless examples of how my writing has gotten me into some strange situations or straight-up confusion. The most prominent ones including family members, of course. And friends have gotten their share, too.

I should say that I feel pretty good about how I master the written word, on a computer. I also master it well, on paper. It’s just that it looks like I do not. If I am stressed or writing something in a hurry, it usually ends up looking like a heart baseline on a monitor. If my concentration is split up it looks like a crow jumped around on the paper and that piece of text is for sure lost forever.

In my defense, I could write and construct sentences before the age of 5. I always loved writing stories, short texts or whatever popped into my head.

I remember one time in my Swedish class in grade 4 (about 10 years old). We did a test where we had to write a 200-word essay about what we thought we would be doing as adults. Given the time, I probably wrote about becoming a firefighter or a pilot because that’s what I wanted out of life at that age. I think it’s safe to say, that didn’t happen. I wrote my piece and handed it in to our teacher. The teacher came to me less than 25 minutes later and gave the paper back and told me I had failed the assignment. My heart fell into my stomach but I mustered a ”why?”… and the reply was: ”you need to write out all the words not just how you mumble them”.

”But I did write them!”, I countered, while taking the paper back and, since it was fresh in my memory, I started to read it back to my teacher. After reading it to my teacher I passed the test and got added to extra handwriting classes. Let’s just say they didn’t help much.

When I initially got into my former relationship, I tried to leave cute notes. After a while, I had to stop because it wasn’t very cute having to answer ”what does this say, really?”, over and over.

As said earlier, I have countless of these stories about not getting understood or, even worse, misunderstood in my handwriting. When I was eight years old, I bought my first computer, partly with the money I’ve earned from doing chores and partly with the help of my parents. It was a Commodore 64 and all of a sudden a whole world of writing opened up for me and I could make myself understood in written form. It was an amazing feeling and I still cherish it to this day.

Of course, I still have to make some handwriting but it’s mainly short notes while working on something on the computer and such. I really try hard to make them readable for myself and it seems like it’s working. I am more and more turning over to taking digital notes on my phone/computer instead, just to be safe.