2024-04-04 from the editor of ~insom
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I have bad handwriting.
This was a problem all throughout my childhood because when
your school work has to be handwritten (as mine did) it
doesn't matter how good your maths or Irish or history is --
you will be marked down for legibility. Obviously: I
understand. My step-son is a teacher. If you can't read it,
you can't mark it, you can't know how good or not a piece
is. It's fatiguing to read bad handwriting; I find that even
reading my own, and I usually have some inkling of what I
wrote or memory of writing it.
Separately: I am dyslexic. I was lucky to receive remedial
schooling for my dyslexia and consequently I don't believe
it's ever held me back in life. But for my writing (which
probably isn't actual dysgraphia) the only help I got was
prompting to try harder. To be more careful.
So I slowed down and was more careful and I finished
secondary school and my exams and have not had to handwrite
anything important ever again. I never sat another
examination that didn't involve a computer, or submitted a
piece of work. I certainly didn't need it for work.
I write one letter per year (to my god-daughter, on her
birthday) -- which I draft a copy of in vim, before
handwriting. I keep a lot of notes, especially for work
related topics, but usually they are words and reminders,
not sentences and paragraphs.
A couple of years ago I started journalling, to better
understand and reflect on my feelings and thoughts: fuck it
is frustrating to handwrite things. What I realise now, and
maybe someone said to me back when I was a kid, is that I
was always in a rush. I'm having thoughts and I want to get
them out on paper and my hands can't keep up _and_ make
things legible -- so I'm giving up on legibility and going
all in on volume.
It must have been amazing when I learned to type. I can type
at about 70 words-per-minute. I'm sure I could not always do
that, although I always remember being a fast typist -- even
when I was hunting and pecking with two fingers I was fast
_by that standard_. Suddenly I could get things out of my
brain and onto paper (yeah: typewriters were a thing when I
was a kid) or onto a computer.
I dictated my journal for a few weeks, around the time I
quit my job, then I typed it back up and pasted it into my
journal. The appeal of dictating isn't there for me: I
suppose it made sense when Important People didn't do their
own typing, and they could get their notes out at speaking
speed (faster than they could write, faster than they could
type if they could at all).
Ironically, it's only trying the practice of handwriting,
slowing down, and thinking about how things make me feel
that has made me aware of why writing on paper felt so
frustrating for me for so long.
Knowing this, I suppose that I will carry on with the
notebooks: journalling is for slow thoughts.
