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.