Hi, my name is Eve and I don’t know how to write.
I am ashamed to admit that I’m absolutely rubbish at writing by hand.
Me, a person who appreaciates and adores all sorts of handcrafts, and who can knit a damn fine pair of wool socks or mittens and in general is good with her hands, can hardly even write my own damn name with a pen on paper. My handwriting is so shit that it looks like a 7-year-old boy wrote it, no offence to any who are actual 7-year-old boys, but you know what I mean. It is not pretty.
A few weeks ago an adult male friend of mine showed some of his notes to me and I could not believe how pretty his handwriting was. It was proper beautiful cursive and I was so jealous of his writing skills. I decided I want to do something about my own handwriting.
I hardly ever write by hand, but when I do, I’d want it to look even half decent and feminine. First I didn’t even know how I would go about learning cursive, but I remembered back in first and second grade we has these notebooks that would help us learn to write by first mimicing the letter that was printed on the page with a light grey colour, and then you would go on repeating it for several pages. I didn’t think those are widely available anywhere so I put the idea on a backburner for a while.
Yesterday I got a very special gift from a very special teacher, who I jokingly mentioned to needing some help with learning to write. I got a notebook with lines to help me learn cursive, the very same kind we used to have 20 years ago, and copies of practise pages from a cursive notebook. So now I have something to start with.
Today I picked up a pencil and started learning. Dear lord it is HARD! I think there is a wire missing, tangled or loose between my brain and hand, because my hand does not do what I want it to. There is next to none hand-eye coordination and my hand is cramping when I try to force it to write pretty letters. I really feel like I’m holding a pencil for the first time in my life when trying to mimic the wavy letters on my practise sheets.
Wish me luck and pray for my patience as I try to learn a skill that I was never good at even in school.
Ps. I hope I don’t get send to detention any time soon.