Handwriting, what’s that?

Sitting Down with Pen to Paper – Remember Those Days?

 This is a weird post, but necessary.  Have any of you thought about how long it’s been since you sat down and hand wrote a note to someone?  I cannot get over how much texting and emailing people have taken over my life.  Gone are the days when I sit down and write a thoughtful note to a friend, and that’s just sad.  Oddly, it’s something that I cherished for years, and that I did on a regular basis back in the day.  But not so much anymore.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time I sat down and hand-wrote anything.  I used to send out several hundred Christmas cards each year, and hand-wrote the addresses.  A few years ago, I told my husband that I was done with that because it was so difficult getting a family picture.  My daughter was away at college and my son was busy with sports, so if we were all together, we weren’t together, if that makes sense.  Ha, but the best part was getting out of handwriting those addresses!  For some reason, I never used the service that input the address and printed it, I just thought it looked more authentic if the sender actually sat down and put in the effort.  But once I decided to bail, I cannot tell you happy it made me.  This didn’t sit well with my husband at all until we started receiving much fewer cards because I wasn’t the only one who had that idea.  Clearly, with social media, all you need to do is throw something up on FB and call it a day.  Then he reminded me that I don’t post family pictures on FB and he had me.  In looking back, that’s the last time that I ever sent handwritten notes publicly.

Recently, with building my business, I’ve been meeting with lots of different people and a handwritten note would be a nice thing to do. But per my habits, I generally send a text message with some cute emojis and call it a day. If called for, I go online and send something small and add a “Gift message”, but sometimes, this is too extra – so after some recent meetings, I purchased cute little thank you cards, and was ready to write them out.  And here is where it all went South.  I sat down with my very cute note cards and started to write out my cards, and my hand and brain were NOT aligned and I didn’t know if the cards should be in cursive or standard print.  And then I started to mix the two forms, which is how I normally write when I’m taking notes for myself.  Yikes, as I looked at these cute cards that I had purchased, ruined with my chicken scratch, I was horrified!  Even my husband, who was sitting across the desk from me, looked over and said, “You can’t send those, it looks like a 5th grader wrote them”.  He was right.  Can you imagine?  I was so mad because I ruined perfectly good cards, and also because my penmanship suc**and I couldn’t figure out how that happened.

What to do in this situation?  I went to my “go to” – where I learn how to do almost everything – YouTube.  I looked up “how to” cursive writing tutorials, and I started to practice.  I’m not kidding, currently, I’m only on the D’s because I want my writing to look good, and the D’s are hard!  I have a notebook by my desk, and in between meetings, I sit with a pen and a paper, and just like when we were in elementary school, I do a row of each letter of the alphabet.   If I’m being honest, my writing still doesn’t look great, but this is what I will do until I feel comfortable sending out a beautifully handwritten note to anyone.  I love learning and growing, but never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would be working on my handwriting skills.  There are just certain things that get away from us as we get older, and if we don’t practice those skills, they go away. 

This post is short and sweet.  If we want to fix or improve anything – it IS possible.  There are videos on virtually anything we want to learn.  So, if your handwriting stinks, don’t just throw in the towel, spend 10 minutes a day working on it, and watch how it improves.  My issue happens to be handwriting, but this can apply to anything.  I’m a huge believer in small changes lead to big results.  Hopefully, I get past the D’s, but as of now, it’s not happening any time soon. I will sit with my pen and pad and go ham on these letters until I strike perfection.

Find something that you mentally threw away, and get after it.  And remember, a little bit each day can lead to big results if you stick with it.

2022!