Stick Figures Gone Rogue
In seventh grade, I learn my handwriting is wrong like I learn most things, stuck between teenage comparison and prying eyes. It’s not that I write the words wrong or that I am incapable of writing. Rather it becomes a matter that my handwritten letters look nothing like those of the girls around me. My vowels don’t curl around themselves, looping o’s and curlicued consonants don’t stay on one straight line, and rough quick etchings where there should be light marks. Instead, my papers look more like stick-figures gone rogue: my lines are constantly slanted and all of my curved letters could very well be floating in the middle of the page. My handwriting takes on a style more closely associated with the carelessness of boys.
And yes, of course it’s in comparison to the girls around me, because that is all teenage girlhood is: a competition of who’s better, who’s prettier or has the nicest clothes. Sentimentality and friendship are outweighed by the list of things we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to know.
It’s only in sitting by Olivia and Jade in my social studies class, our three notebooks put together for a project, that I begin to notice these things. Their pages are covered in scrawling, perfectly pretty prose with swooshing crisp lines. Mine sits next to them, words running over faded blue lines and down into the next space, shapes halting and sharp, and little scribbles drawn over all of the margins. I take a single glance around the tables next to us, thinking maybe somebody else has caught onto this strange phenomenon of two people’s penmanship looking so similar and beautiful.
But no, if anything my glance around the table reveals that the only other notebook that looks remotely similar to mine is Ryan Teichman’s—decidedly not something I want to be compared to. It’s shame that sinks and curdles, shame that wraps my fingers tightly around my pencil while I fight against blushing cheeks.
Somehow, I missed something that all of the other girls now know. I want to snatch my notebook back from the center of the table.
When I first bring my handwriting up to my mother in a conversation about how my day is, it is that same forbearance of knowledge that greets me, expectations I didn’t even know existed weighing against the desire to just be.
All the other girls in my grade write pretty, I say, white suburban door only just swinging shut before I manage to start up the conversation. I am still young enough to see apple cheeks in the rearview mirror, to get away with buying my clothes at the Gap, and to think that everything wrong can be explained. My mother’s face is impartial, nothing close to the forlorn confusion that’s overtaken my own at this revelation, pursed lips and furrowed eyebrows. I can’t remember why this was the thing that caught my attention, except my knowledge that it separated me from the other girls I know.
I’m not sure what response I’m expecting from my mother, but it isn’t Well, maybe if you tried you could fix it. It might be a problem with how you’re holding your pencil. I sit there for a minute, stunned. I look down almost unconsciously, fixated on the callous that sits near the bottom of my nail bed, raised flesh dipping into the creases of my knuckles, as big and obvious as a plateau. Something that’s always been there, that still aches like a sore bruise whenever I write for too long. For the first time, it looks ugly. For the first time I am all too aware that it exists.
In the space between my mother backing the car out of the spot and switching it into drive, I wrestle my face back into something that resembles nonchalance, though I’m sure it fails.
Sitting in the back of the car, all I can think of is how easy it must be for my mother to say that. My mother whose mother was a school teacher, who grew up learning both print and cursive in her writing, going to school in the seventies when things like handwriting were still important. My mother whose handwriting fills out permission slips and lunchbox notes and check stubs and grocery lists with a swift but not indelicate flick of the wrist, with scrawling cursive figures and long smooth letters. Sometimes, I can’t even read her handwriting, though it’s always evenly spaced and written straight across an axis even on unlined papers. Though I’ve spent years learning my own writing, I still cannot quite understand the precision with which she writes, and I cannot make out letters I know I should know. Maybe it’s something I’ll learn to grow into, like wearing makeup and learning how to walk in high heels. Maybe there’s some milestone in my life I haven’t passed yet to read pretty, and that’s why I can’t write pretty. However, if that’s the case, I won’t know until later in life, which means I can’t do anything right now, so there must be something else to it that I’m missing.
I take to cataloging my thoughts, legs sticking against the leather car seats, fingers wrapped firmly around the nylon seatbelt. I allow myself to come to the conclusion that if there is a reason my handwriting is so different from the neat scrawl of all the other girls I know, then it must be as, my mother says, my fault. Though it goes unsaid, I’m sure it must be my own fault that another thing in my life has warped to fit the mess of my brain.
I wonder what I can do to fix it, think about pulling out those awful rubber grips my mother would attempt to slide onto my pencils and in the pockets of my bag throughout elementary school. The odd misshapen ones with indents and engraved numbers correlating to my fingers, or the puffy white and blue and pink foam cylinders that were little more than cushions, or even the sparkly red and green and orange chewy ones with different texture patterns. I’d spent frustrating hours at school and at home attempting to coax my fingers to fit the grips and convince my brain that this felt normal, but it only ever made me angry. Besides, I’d rationalized, it wasn’t as if I couldn’t write, it was only that my hand didn’t look the same as everyone else’s, fingers bent awkwardly around pen, pencil, paintbrush. At least I wasn’t smearing the ink across my palms while I wrote.
As quickly as I even think the notion up, I shake it straight out of my head. There’s almost no value in teaching myself to write differently, to fix my grip when I can just figure out how to move my hand in similar strokes to the girls with prettier handwriting. I can learn how to teach myself to do better without changing. It seems counterintuitive, or wrong, to think I can change a piece without changing the whole, but entire philosophies have been constructed on less. And I am still in the back of the car, slouching against the seatbelt, under the weight of my mother’s words.
At some point, I’ll learn the intricacies of handwriting and the theory behind it, how passionate people pay less attention to their handwriting (a line I’m all too willing to believe). How studies conclude it’s mostly about brain chemistry, and not nearly worth the worry I gave it. I’ll see how the girls with pretty looping handwriting spend more time tracing out their notes than actually taking them down, wasting precious minutes drawing the shapes to a T when they could be catching every word of the lecture. Watch one word be completed in the waning seconds it takes me to write two sentences as they highlight and underline it. Watch them emphasize words like the in sparkly blue and neon pink gel pens. I’ll realize that surely the precision they take these notes with, far outweighs the benefits of actually retaining them. Instead, they are far more focused on the aesthetic than the information itself. It’ll make me glad for my boyish handwriting.
It’ll stop mattering once I graduate high school and comparison will feel like the worst thing that can spill from my mind to my mouth. Comparison, just like messy handwriting, is no longer cute or understandable when you’re eighteen, no longer something you believe you can work through, just like anger issues or forehead acne. So instead, I push fixing my handwriting to the back of my mind, spend lectures filling up the margins of my journal with frantic notes and questions that I’ll rush to ask the professor after class. Most of the other girls around me will continue to write pretty, and I will continue to pretend that I never once thought about how handwriting was something I was expected to perfect, to be like everyone else, before I could even practice it.
Lydia Alexandra is a recent graduate from John Brown University and will be pursuing her Masters degree in Northern Ireland. This is her first official publication. She primarily writes creative nonfiction but loves to experiment with genres and mixed media. She is also a coffee connoisseur and an avid fan of 80’s rock music.
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