The Handwriting on the Wall

My father gave me a journal when I was 11. Our family had just immigrated to Memphis, Tennessee from Tehran, Iran, a drastic life change which our parents never discussed with me and my 4 year old brother. We just packed up all of our belongings into several large wooden shipping crates, boarded a 747, and landed in Memphis. But at least dad did give me the journal. “Write it down, Faramarz. It is important,” he said. Maybe he was acknowledging the changes we had coming. I still have that journal. It was my companion for many years of my life. Perusing some of its entries now, my early memories of America come back in Technicolor. My cursive looked different then – swooping loops and flowing strokes – in striking contrast to how I write now.

Though teenage years are difficult for many of us, high school in Memphis was an especially awkward time for me – as a “just-off-the-boat” Iranian kid dropped into an all-white southern private Christian school, I struggled to fit in. My anxiety surfaced in a knuckle-cramping, tense handwriting style. I would grasp the pencil in my right hand and then arch my wrist painfully to the right as the pen went across the page [as an aside, Farsi is written from right to left; though I had always written in English, perhaps the right to left movement of my heritage was programmed in?] As the pen moved right, my wrist would painfully twist to keep up, and then gradually my elbow would contort into my trunk to stay on the line, with me white-knuckling the pen the entire time. Comments my friends made about how awkward it looked made me even more self-conscious. The result was a spiky, tilted, irregular, and barely legible scrawl that perfectly reflected how I felt as I created it.

In my freshman year of college, computers became available, and I shifted mostly to writing on a keyboard. The cute, toaster-sized personal Mac that I proudly bought from the student bookstore booted up with a smiley face. I was smiling too, relieved that my handwriting was going underground.

In medical school, the only writing I did was using a #2 pencil to fill in little ovals on computerized test forms. I finished 4th in my class without having to ever write a full sentence anywhere by hand. By now, handwriting became mostly irrelevant, and unpleasant, like that crazy uncle that you have to put up with at thanksgiving and try to forget about the rest of the year.

The few times that I had to write were embarrassing and excruciating. A moment from one of my first acts as a medical doctor stands out. I had been called in for a hospital consult to see a patient with an eye problem. It was the early 90’s, we were still writing in thick, unwieldy plastic-covered charts with pages ringed at the top. I dreaded using those beasts – there was simply no comfortable way to write in them. The pages had one column for “doctors orders,” and another column for notes. Each column was about three inches wide – barely enough for me to scribble 4 words. I knew my “Consult Note” would be a mess when I finished.

The easy part was examining and diagnosing the patient. Then came the painful part: I had to write my note. Here, some other doctor, or group of doctors, would be counting on my expertise, so my note had to be legible. What’s more, I was just starting my career in Memphis, TN, and I didn’t want to look like a buffoon. The consult form was in triplicate – a white copy for the chart, a yellow copy for the my records, and a pink copy for billing – so I had to press the pen down hard. My anxiety built as I teetered the 2 pound chart on my lap and started writing, trying in vain to slow myself down to a legible scrawl. My grip became more tense, and writing became literally painful, my fingers and wrist cramping into knots.

In med school, we were taught to record patient visits in a specific format, called “SOAP,” which stood for subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. And that’s how I intended to write my consult note. I had to summarize the patient’s medical history, why they had been admitted, and why I had been consulted. The idea was to produce a narrative that the other doctors taking care of the patient could follow. I wanted to appear organized and neat, but I could barely stay within the lines. Eventually, I relapsed into my usual slashing, jerking font. When I was wrapping up, in the “Assessment/Plan” section of the consult, I again tried to slow down, as this was the part that mattered most. I prayed that the other chart-readers could make out a few important words here. There was no way to correct errors, other than starting over with another sheet. I left feeling defeated, stressed. The actual care of the patient had taken a back seat to the internal battle I had fought against my right hand.

Over the next several years, as my handwriting continued to deteriorate, I became convinced that I had some catastrophic neurological problem like Parkinson’s, or worse, Lou Garrick’s Disease. I hid my fears, taking cover in the standard joke that I would hear several times a week: “You must be a doctor… I can tell from your handwriting!” I was now dreading writing by hand so much that filling out a check at a grocery check out became uncomfortable. Credit card scanners came to the rescue as computers had in the 80’s.

What My Handwriting Revealed

In 2023, in my job as an eye doctor, I don’t even carry a pen. Writing by hand is a relic, like kids trick or treating by themselves. Either we are clicking keyboards or thumb-pecking on a smart phone. So I was pained when, a few weeks ago, I started reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, a self-directed creativity workshop. Central to this program is what Cameron calls the “morning pages”: three handwritten pages done upon awakening. The idea of taking time to write THREE pages each morning was not appealing. A friend had recommended this program to me, so I pushed through. I bought a lined journal, started faithfully filling up three pages each morning, and I have done so for the past 32 days.

What did I realize?

I found that my handwriting is a reflection of how I live my life.

Here is a sample from my journal on day 1:

I value universal love, deep understanding, and PEACE. Why then does my handwriting look frenetic, rushed, imperceptible, uncaring, nervous, disturbed, even angry?

The more I considered it, the more I thought my handwriting is revealing my true self. Most days, I hardly notice my connection to nature and to other humans. I pulsate through each second, or worse, drift numbly from one moment to another without fully appreciating any of them. At the end of the week, I can’t recall what I ate, what I felt, how I got to work, who we spoke to. Andwhat all of it meant? An irrelevant afterthought.

Can Handwriting Show Inner Change?

Two weeks into the morning pages, as I was struggling with coming up with content and my wrist was cramping as usual, I decided to try a different approach. My early morning pages focused on WHAT I was writing. This morning, I made the conscious shift to HOW I wrote. Cameron had admonished that we shouldn’t re-read our writing, and I suspect that is a hint: maybe it’s not the content but the experience of writing that counts?

I took a deep breath, and slowed my hand to a snail’s pace. Instead of shooting from word to word, I pretended I was doing eye surgery with a scalpel. I focused my attention on the movement of the pen, now making an infant’s deliberate crawl across the page. I focused on each stroke, the pen moving through each loop and line and dot. I narrowed my focus to the point that the pen contacted the paper, and the pen became weightless in my fingers. I envisioned single molecules of ink melding with the page as I drew the pen tip across the page. Normally, I fear losing my train of thought, so I rush through the words, frustrated at the pace of my hand. This time, I kept bringing my focus back to the one word I was writing, reassuring myself that the rest of the thought would be there when I needed it. And it was, every time.

This is the exercise I put myself through, day after day, for three more weeks. Each time, my tension would crescendo until I felt like dropping the pen, closing the journal and moving on to some “important” task. And each time, I would breathe through this sticking point to the other side, with the writing becoming fluid and relaxed again. For a few moments, my hand wrote as if it was performing a ballet – balanced, smooth, elegant.

On day 25, I stopped in the middle of my morning pages, and compared my handwriting to the first day – the transformation I saw was unexpected. It looked like a different person had been writing in my journal. When I started the journal, I would have said such a change was not possible:

What had changed? I took a minute to let this question soak in. My brain and body were the same, right? What felt very different was my inner state as I wrote the above block. For a blissful moment, focus, calm, relaxation, and clarity had overcome anxiety, worry, tension, and chaos. It wasn’t that I was writing differently… I was different. My relationship with handwriting had changed. Could my relationship with life be as amenable to change?

Handwriting as Meditation

The act of writing by hand is can be simultaneously minute and vast. Consider the miracle that is the continuous column of blue ink moving through the pen reservoir onto the page. Where does the ink come from? A bush? A chemical factory? Whose hands built the pen? Who packed it? Who delivered it to the house? And think about the energy passes through the pen as we spill our inner thoughts, passions, or misgivings onto the paper? Will these ideas make it past the closed cover of the journal? Will they become a book, or maybe join a landfill?

As I write, I let these thoughts wash through. I just keep writing, and repeatedly bringing my focus back into the interface between the tip of the pen and the paper.

The act of writing by hand had become the meditation.

It’s not about the Handwriting

“Well, why did you just write an entire article about handwriting, then,” you ask? I’m not suggesting that you should start journaling, though I am a huge fan of that now. The point is that your experience of the outer world just may be a reflection of your inner world. In most cases, your power to effect change in the outer world is limited. But what you do have control over is… you.

For those of you that have read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, this is old hat. If not, then enjoy one of the many profundities from the book:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation,

we are challenged to change ourselves.”

I know that it is a stretch that changing something small, like learning to write legibly, will spill out into the other aspects of your life. But once you have felt balance anywhere, opportunities to practice balance start popping up everywhere. Whether you read The Artist’s Way like me, or choose something else to work on, have faith that everything you need is right here, right now.

Faramarz Hidaji, M.D.