things you write by hand...

how different selves write different ways

[This is an excerpt from my notebook. It’s about things I think are true, with enough other things that could go either way that I can’t really recommend it to anyone who’s currently questioning the nature of reality.]

As you can see, I have three different kinds of handwriting. It all started when I lived in LA & I went to see a semi-famous psychic. She was semi-famous because she’d advised a couple of actors on a popular sit-com & had done a few readings for Nancy Reagan. I had no idea she was semi-famous when I went. I had a friend who told me she was really good & I was at that point in my life where I thought it’d be a good idea if I knew what I was here to do, because working in the office at a mannequin factory didn’t seem to be it.

Anyway, when I saw her, she told me several things, some of which turned out to be true & others that were true-ish if I twisted myself into that shape. She also told me to do a journaling exercise where I wrote everything with my other hand. She said it would spark my inner child.

Write one word at a time, she said. Do not skip ahead to the next word & I thought to myself (forgetting that she was a semi-famous psychic) Well, duh. All you ever write is one word at a time. She reached over & patted my hand. That’s what you think now, she said. Try it first & see.

For the whole rest of the session I hummed quietly to myself so she couldn’t pick up on what I was thinking & that took my whole focus so I don’t remember much else of what went on. Still, when I got home, I pulled out a notebook & tried it. I immediately noticed two things. First, I had plenty of words that wanted to just jump right in after the first word like they expected to be there. Which meant that writing one word at a time was not as easy as it sounded. In fact, it required sloooooooowing way down & writing only one word & when that word was finished, forgetting it entirely & writing the next word that showed up.

The second thing was that once I started to do the One Word At A Time Thing there was something like a door that opened in me & from that door came the kind of light you feel wash through your whole body & I thought, There might be something to this.
So, I did it every day for a year & then most of the days for the year after that. By then, I had the pattern of it, the way you let the words come to your fingertips like a secret message you’re hearing from very far away. Rather than An Important Thing You Need To Say so people will finally see you as the serious person you are.

It is a very different way of thinking about writing than I started out with & I’m not to the end of it yet. (But, so far, it’s kept my attention the whole time…:-))

with love, brian