Why "Bad Handwriting" Is No Reason to Skip Journaling

Picture a high school health class, Reader.

Fluorescent lights. A coach who also, for reasons lost to history, taught health. And a handout that claimed to read your personality from your handwriting.

Big swooping letters? Extrovert.
​Pressing down hard? Confident.
​Neat and flowing? Detail-oriented, responsible, going places.

We were all hunched over each other's papers, cackling, diagnosing our friends like wannabe psychics.

And then I looked down at mine.

Large. Slanted. Kinda cursive. Mostly illegible. Half the letters not bothering to finish. A word I'd started to spell out that just gave up and trailed into a flat little line.

Not neat.
Not flowing.
Definitely not "going places."

And here's the leap a sixteen-year-old brain makes in about a second flat: bad handwriting = bad person. I went full-on Brené Brown shame spiral a solid decade before I knew who she was.

I carried that verdict around for at least ten years. A decade of opening a notebook and hearing a faint little voice go Your handwriting's bad, so whatever you put here is going to be bad too — issued, originally, by a man whose actual expertise was blowing a whistle.

Two things are wrong with that verdict, and I want you to have both.

One: you're comparing yourself to a rigged sample.

When is the last time you watched another adult handwrite something? Chalkboards became whiteboards, whiteboards became slides, and now it's basically nothing. We almost never write by hand in front of each other anymore.

So the only handwriting you ever see is the exceptional stuff — the gorgeous loops on a wedding envelope, the one coworker whose whiteboard notes look typeset. You're stacking your everyday grocery-list scrawl against the two prettiest samples you've encountered all decade. Of course you lose. The contest is rigged.

Two: messy handwriting usually means a fast brain.

I write badly because I write fast, and I write fast because if I don't, the thought is gone. Elizabeth Gilbert describes ideas as living things you have to grab by the tail before they wander off to somebody else — that's exactly it. Pretty handwriting is slow handwriting. Slow handwriting loses the thought.

My chicken scratch was never proof I'm careless. It's proof I was keeping up.

Your one small thing this week:

Fill one page as fast as you physically can.​
On purpose. Ugly on purpose. Don't close your letters, don't dot a single thing, let the words lean into each other like they're exhausted.

Then read it back. That's not a sloppy page. That's the actual speed of your mind, finally caught on paper.

Then hit reply and tell me: what did somebody once say about you — offhand, probably not even meaning much by it — that you're somehow still carrying? I told you mine. I'd really like to hear yours.

Deep breaths. Just write.

Krystal

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P.S. If a whistle-blowing man from 2003 is still living rent-free in your notebook, consider this his eviction notice.