A Short History of My Handwriting

1 point · November 2026 · 1 comment

Age six: enormous. Each letter its own building. The teacher wrote good underneath and the good was smaller than my g.

Age eleven: joined-up, on instruction, and furious about it. Joining the letters felt like being told to hold hands.

Age fifteen: illegible on purpose. I had discovered that handwriting was a thing people judged, and decided they could judge nothing. Teachers wrote please write clearly and I wrote it back to them, unclearly.

Age twenty: a girl I liked had beautiful handwriting, and for about four months so did I. When it ended, the handwriting stayed for another year and then collapsed, like a building whose tenant has left.

Age thirty: none. I typed. I signed things. The signature became a gesture, a line with a bump in it, and I could not have told you what letters it was made of.

Age forty-one, last Tuesday: my daughter asked me to write out the alphabet so she could copy it, and I found, to my surprise, the six-year-old. Enormous. Each letter a building. She looked at it and said yours is bigger than mine, and I said yes, it always was.