Why is it so hard to write about myself?

“Personal Identity: Explore some aspect of your identity about which you’re curious, troubled, conflicted, or unsure.”

You read the prompt. You read it over and over. And all you can think about is…

That you hate writing about yourself.

You hate it.

You remember writing your college essays, answering eternal questions of: “What do you love?” or “What challenges you?”

You felt that everything you wrote was:

Not authentic.

Cringey.

Hypocritical.

You prefer to explain things figuratively through metaphors, beautiful adjectives, and personifications, maybe that could make your texts more valuable.

You hate yourself for thinking that way, you are frustrated because it sounds like you are trying so hard to seem unique. But you know…. Inside…. it’s more than that.

You remember staring at a wide-eyed psychologist, as he asked you to talk to him as if he were your younger self. You couldn’t. The words twisted in your throat and came out in someone else’s voice. Someone completely alien to you. Because that is who your younger self is to you. Someone else, left in the past. No connection whatsoever. To this day you still haven’t been able to do it.

Another psychologist told you once that you viewed yourself as someone with fragmented identities. Sprinkled selves separated through every move to a different country, a family divorce, and therapy sessions. So many years of psychoanalysis, to a point where you feel like you know yourself so well that you don’t want to think about it for another minute. You ask yourself, “Does that make sense?” But then you wonder if you’re just rambling.

Does this lack authenticity?

Are you cringey?

Hypocritical?

And the spiral starts again….

So when left with no other choices, you realize that maybe, just maybe, you could write about that. Try to understand why it is so hard to just sit down and write about yourself. No metaphors or outlandish ways to avoid saying the simplest things. Just write about how you can’t write.

You think you can do that.

So you try and begin…

You start at the part that makes you most uncomfortable. The part that paralyzes your poet’s pen—that pen that usually overflows with purple prose. It’s the autobiographical aim, the invitation to carve into your soul in order to answer a vague question with one whole, direct answer.

When producing a self-narration you are supposed to display “a language that speaks of and constructs identity and which is, simultaneously, creating and presenting a sense of self”1 But what if you are yet to decipher that language itself? What if the language that constructs this ‘sense of self’ has so many variants that it has become a fractured one, representing, in itself, a fractured self?

The way you spoke to the world as a child is now a faraway memory, an innocent dialect too foreign to understand eighteen years later. Now words have twisted and turned, confused by your bilingual mind that mixes Spanish and English. Any “life of living across languages can leave a child with a fragmented sense of identity,”2 and you are one of those children. Throughout your life, the language of your identity has evolved and adapted to where you were living. Every move, from place to place, marked a breaking point. It represented the death of one identity and the rebirth of a new one. Each branching dialect carried on the trauma of every move, forever changing the way you spoke every single time. Thus, now you see your life as a timeline of deaths and rebirths, every time with a one-way airplane ticket in hand. It is a eulogy you can give by memory. Every death leaves behind an old sense of self and allows the rebirth of a new inner dialogue adapted to the new context you found yourself in. So how are you supposed to establish one language of identity when its grammatical rules and structure are always changing? How are you supposed to do that when, at each point in life, you have spoken different versions of a similar dialect?

In your own mind, your complete identity is a thing so far away, so complex that you can only imagine it figuratively. Perhaps, your form of self-narration is one that “attempts to produce a new form of autobiography where past selves are critiqued and identity can be seen as fluid and fragmented.”3 But then again, the question there is…. Are you willing to open up the fragmented bits and pull them apart to find a whole answer? Is that even possible? To find one language that will explain all of these fragmented pieces of identity. To decipher the lost dialects left behind from pain and fear? To examine the origin of the lingo you speak now which would have scared your past identities and their own dictionaries? You worry that it might not be authentic, that there is no way to be able to express, in your current place and time, how your inner dialogue was expressed when you were smaller. You feel like you are betraying that little girl.

Maybe the only way to view your current identity is to see it as one that has evolved throughout your life. That could be the only way to see yourself as whole, even if not authentic. Maybe you now see that the abandoned inner dialogues of before, ones so different from those of the present, were necessary to leave behind so you could actually grow to have the inner dialogue you are having with yourself now.

It seems, to you, that maybe you can’t write about yourself because it is scary to confront the abandoned tongues of your past selves, that you can’t find a cohesive way to talk about all of the ways your mother tongue has changed, and in a way, you are ashamed that it has so much. Because, through all of the change, your past self would not understand the language your present identity speaks today, and putting it in writing would be too much of an exposure to all the metamorphosis that has occurred in times of change. So you prefer for all that change to stay lost in time and space, because lost words and languages are left behind for a reason….

Just say it with me:

I don’t like writing about myself because it makes me consider parts of me that I don’t want to think about….

Sometimes, when looking within is too hard, you decide to look up. Up at the constellations of stars and energy.

Sometimes, it seems that connecting dots is easier on a practical chart.

Sometimes, it’s easier to explain the stars than to explain oneself in simple adjectives.

The sky is more mythical, magical, and abstract and yet at the same time you can see it. Seemingly the perfect metaphor.

You can trace the constellations with your own fingers, go back and find their meanings.

Instead of writing your own identity, you let the stars write it for you so you can read it back.

Astrology “sutures experience, possibility and choice, offering elective biographies, thereby contributing to the project of self-identity.”4 Thus, this pseudoscience breaks down parts of your personality into small parts, it allows you to find these fragmented pieces of your identity in an organized manner, allowing you to see how they interact.

You remember first sitting down with your astrologer, Susana, when you were only fifteen years old. Still very lost and worried, going to therapy every Monday, and a doctor every other day to see if someone could give you answers about your chronic sinusitis. Taking any deep breaths was hard back then. It was a two-hour discussion… The solace you found in a small astrological chart was immense and unpredictable. Yes, you hate how cringey that sounds, the need to run towards the stars to understand who you are.

But… that experience changed the way you saw yourself. Well, not really changed, but it gave you a way to explain it, it gave you reasons for your personality that you had never had the words to talk about. Through the dissection of the astrological chart, the blockage that prevents you from autobiographical reflection in writing is erased, and ‘magically’ reveals tensions within your own biographical narrative, helping you to find some sort of self-identity.5 Thus, when having to combat the cracks of your fragmented identity the chart seems to be a way to look at something whole that can explain fragments. So… astrology became the fixed dictionary to explain yourself, so that as you changed, a cohesive language would follow you, written in the sky’s blue paper lines.

So through this analysis, you realize that maybe you can’t write about yourself because it is so abstract and direct. That you need a medium through which you can expand and analyze in order to piece together vocabularies and explorations about your identity. This is the reason why your bookshelf is now dominated by books on astrology, and why you have a yearly check-up with Susi, to anticipate your year as written in the stars. It is a pseudoscience that, even though it is a cringey way for self-expression, it gives way to interpretations of yourself where you wield its own meaning. It gifts you the medium to understand yourself without feeling stripped down. The constellations cover you in protection with their own codes, twists and turns, to explain your inner self. You prefer their twinkling meanings and metaphors much more than your own.

Yet, the question remains… why do you feel so exposed when you write? Your language may be anything but cohesive, you might prefer constellations for explanations, but all the same, when it comes down to typing down the words, you stare at a naked page.

A naked, blank page.

You would rather it stay that way. Stipped to the core.

Naked in the sense that, there is nothing on it, an absence of words and meaning.

You would rather there be a naked absence than a naked vulnerability. That type of naked writing is the one you fear. The one that instead of blankness offers exposure.

Hemingway said it best: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”6

Because the real question is: Who are you bleeding for? Why are you writing this?

(for once try to answer this with no metaphors)

As an avid reader, words have always been precious to you. Books and poems inspire your soul, you want their hardcovers to devour you whole so you live in them forever. You love the metaphors and you love writing them. But when the spotlight is shined on you, when the ink wasted on pages has to include the word “I” you spiral. There you start again with the vicious cycle: “Not authentic. Cringey. Hypocritical. ”

Writing really is an intimate act.7 But for some reason you want to be on the receiving end of that intimacy, you want to read others’ words and thoughts, but giving back to the craft is hard. It might be because you connect so much to words on paper that reading your own on there seems surreal, a reach to become someone whose words truly do deserve to be read.

This seems to be the cause of your inner critic, who seems to come out roaring in writing. Because autobiographical writing involves “recreating the past in an attempt to discover and invent the self,” you are afraid of what your inner critic might find exposed in the words that pour out through self-exploration.8 This in turn causes you to become more inclined to a technique called “self-distancing” in which “one replaces the first-person pronoun I with a non-first-person pronoun, you or he/she, when talking to themselves.”9 You now realize that the only way for you to talk about yourself rationally, is to do it from a distance. That is the only way you can actually face this inner critic, and see what they have to say. The only way for you to be naked in writing is to distance yourself from it through the language itself.

Yet, in the back of your mind, you know that your inner critic is not the only thing you worry about. It is also bothered by the idea of standing naked and vulnerable to other people’s critiques, what they will interpret and analyze in your writing. Your inner critic assures you that they are probably going to agree, the writing is: Not authentic. Cringey. Hypocritical. And you worry that their reflection on that very piece of writing will basically represent you as a whole.

You look now and read back that paragraph and realize that this way of thinking is hypocritical indeed. Because, it doesn’t matter if an “I” changed into a “you” or a “she”, you are still talking about yourself at the core of this essay. The language changes nothing. All it does is sugarcoat the process to actually write it. But the vulnerability is there. You have bled through your typewriter and have found yourself completely naked in writing, blinded by a distance that you thought covered miles, but only kept you millimeters from exposure.

Conclusion

So you decided, long ago, to abandon the “I” and distance yourself from the responsibility of writing about yourself, of feeling the way you do. You accepted seeing things from afar, looking at the stars and sky for answers, scared to decipher the languages that make up your multiple identities. You realize now, that those fragments of identities are maybe just that. Fragments of a total, full piece that adds up to one person. The one writing this very essay. Writing about herself on and on for 9 pages, naked in writing, from a distance but so very close. You realize that, as scared as you are, the paper has been written, and no, it is not about someone alienated from you.

It is about me.

Because yes.

I can write about myself.

And that can sound not authentic, cringey, and hypocritical.

After all, I wrote a whole essay about not being able to do it.

But I think I can come to terms with that.

I’ll just have to click submit and see how it goes.

Bibliography

Notes

1. Mary Jane Kehily, “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction,” Gender & Education 7, no. 1 (1995), Academic Search Premier. (My emphasis.)

2. Ken Hu, “The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self,” Public Seminar, November 9, 2022, https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-dilemma-of-a-fragmented-self/.

3. Kehily, “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction.”

4. Paul Clements, “Astrology, modernity and the project of self-identity,” Culture and Religion 21, no. 3 (2020): 260, https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2022.2093234.

5. Clements, “Astrology, modernity and the project of self-identity,” 276.

6.Jessica Archuleta, “How Writing is an act of Vulnerability,” The Writing Cooperative, March 20, 2017, https://writingcooperative.com/on-writing-and-vulnerability-18e30b212b96.

7.Archuleta, “How Writing is an act of Vulnerability.”

8. Kehily, “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction.”

9.Jena E Pincott, “Silencing Your Inner Critic,” Psychology Today, March 4, 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201903/silencing-your-inner-critic.

Pregnant & Afraid

I never truly liked my birthday. Every year, without fail, my family tells the story of how I almost killed my mom. Her pregnancy was going well, great even, until she was actually delivering me and there was too much blood everywhere. Hours after a near-miss, I (being the problem child that I am), stopped breathing. I had to be transported to a different hospital for a specialist, which was totally understandable and okay had I been the only one who needed care, but I was not. No, my mom, who hours after a complicated birth and seeing her child stop breathing in her own arms, was kicked out of the hospital when she needed care and rest too. I almost killed my mom, keyword being “almost”, it could have ended very differently. Knowing this happened to my mom, a Latina immigrant, and knowing that the United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world that disproportionately affects women of color, I’m able to critically think about her experience. I can’t help but question how different her experience would have been had she been a white woman.

Maternal mortality and morbidity is plaguing the United States. Maternal mortality is described as death associated with pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period (about 6-8 weeks postpartum).1 Maternal morbidity is described as the health consequences, associated with pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period, one lives with. America is the “most dangerous industrialized country in which pregnant women can live and deliver.”2 This issue is very multifaceted. It stems from institutional and structural racism that creates an unsafe environment for pregnant women of color, especially Black non-hispanic women. This unsafe environment now consists of many racial disparities such as lack of access to maternal care as well as lack of quality maternal care. Yes, even when women of color have access to maternal care, their experiences are not amazing. They are subjected to doctors whose care is influenced by implicit (and honestly, sometimes, explicit) bias against them for no reason other than their race and/or ethnicity. Even the bare minimum can be harmful to pregnant women of color. It is terrifying to think about how I can go on and on about the horrors of this.

Before we can delve into solving this problem, we must look at the causes. I spoke briefly about institutional and structural racism, but what does this actually mean? Taking a look at Jim Crow laws, legalized practices and policies that segregated Black people, they affected almost every aspect of life and continue doing so even after they were overturned. The “residential segregation due to long standing systemic racism” can be held accountable for the healthcare disparities that take the lives of pregnant women of color.3 For example, the career opportunities for the Black community were limited due to Jim Crow laws and this affected their socioeconomic status heavily.4 By having a low socioeconomic status, you are more likely to not be able to afford healthcare, maternal or other. While this may seem obvious, the implications may not be so obvious. Being able to pay for insurance allows many people to have access to prenatal care, which is incredibly important in decreasing the risk of maternal mortality and morbidity risks.5 The World Health Organization recently updated their prenatal health recommendations from four prenatal visits to the obstetrician to eight.6 If BIPOC women cannot afford healthcare, what makes you think they are going to be able to access prenatal care at all, let alone eight visits?

My sister always tells me stories about going to the local WIC with my mom while she was pregnant with me to get prenatal vitamins. Trying to understand my feelings about these stories was complicated because being able to get WIC benefits means you are a low-income family, yet despite being low-income, you are able to have access to these crucial vitamins. It’s a part of my family’s life where we were able to benefit from poverty. Living as a low-income family was always taxing, yet it helped my mom gain important vitamins for herself. We were lucky, millions of women of color do not get to just drive down to their local WIC; they do not benefit from their poverty.

Not only is this daunting to think about, it opens more doors to this complex issue. The healthier a woman is at conception, it can be assumed that she will have a healthier pregnancy.7 Keeping this in mind, I’d like to point out that women of color, especially Black women, have significantly higher rates of chronic health conditions.8 Before they are even pregnant, the odds of a healthy pregnancy are against them. Can you imagine wanting nothing more than to bring life into the world but having to think that this might also mean you will no longer grace the earth yourself? And why? Because of conditions that are not in your control. For simply living in the wrong zip code, you can be in a maternity care desert where getting maternal care is nearly impossible.9 Maternity care deserts occur in zones most impacted by redlining, another direct effect of Jim Crow laws and other various racist-based policies and practices. Maternity care ranges from prenatal care to access to abortion and contraceptives to postpartum checkups. Living in a maternity care desert goes beyond vitamins, it goes beyond ultrasound scans to see if the fetus is forming healthily, it is quite literally a matter of life and death.

One of the most important first steps in combating maternal mortality should be expanding government healthcare. Living in a maternity care desert is dangerous; by giving access to maternal healthcare thousands of lives will be saved. As of now, there is a policy to extend Medicaid, not expand.10 To me, it seems as though our federal government sees the issue

but wants to do as little as possible to help this issue. By extending it, even if a woman does not qualify for Medicaid they will be able to gain access to medical care for the duration of their pregnancy and two months postpartum.11 While this may seem great, it fails to address the fact that 31% of maternal deaths actually occur within a year postpartum.12 So for the other ten months, they are on their own. They are in one of the most vulnerable states of mind any person can even be in, and their government is doing nothing. It makes me wonder if this “expanding” government healthcare would even work. If they are still living in maternity care deserts, they won’t have a facility to go to to use their healthcare service.

Maybe providing more obstetrician and gynecology facilities in predominantly Black and Brown communities would be a better first step. I live in the San Fernando Valley, a predominantly Latino region of Los Angeles. I’ve lived there my entire life; being away at college is the most I’ve ever been out of the Valley. This means nothing to many of those reading but when I tell you I can count the number of obstetrics and gynecology clinics in the Valley on my hand… well that should perk some ears up. My neighbor from three houses down would ask me to babysit her two toddlers while she commuted over an hour (Los Angeles traffic mixed with the unreliable, inefficient public transportation system mixed with the sheer distance) to the nearest obstetrician clinic that approved her non-insurance covered visit. How is it that someone who has already given birth twice, who knows the importance of prenatal care, is still subjected to such a long trek to a clinic? She is doing her part and her government needs to do theirs.

While access to maternal healthcare is difficult to obtain in the United States, it is not impossible. But if and when women of color do get access to maternal healthcare, it’s a question of whether it’s of good quality. That’s another layer to this issue, having maternal healthcare is great but if you are being treated with no respect, it does not seem that great. Studies have shown that Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian women experience considerably lower quality maternal care than their white counterparts.13 There are instances of belittling and just blatant disrespect. When my mom was pregnant with my brother, the doctors would talk about her as if she wasn’t there and would only talk amongst themselves. She would hear and understand everything they were saying, but then another person would come in and say everything the doctors were saying but in Spanish. There was not a single document that indicated whether my mom needed or wanted an interpreter; no doctor ever even attempted to talk to her directly. They simply looked at her and disregarded her (she had already been fluent in English for ten years at this point in her life). There was no communication whatsoever between the doctors or my mom until she actually got upset about the entire situation. Every time she tells the story, I get chills. I can only imagine how she and thousands of other women have felt when doctors do not take you seriously or consult you about your own body.

Doctors have a way of either making you feel incredibly safe or entirely isolated in the delivery room. I think that is why many Black pregnant women choose to have a midwife present in the delivery room with them.14 When a midwife has been present for the entire duration of the pregnancy and the delivery, rates of healthy infants and mothers increase.15 There is safety in having someone in the room with you that is more concerned about your wellbeing than the fetus’s. I wish my mom had someone like that. She had my grandmother and dad in the room but they were all worried about me, who was taking care of my mom? I do think she carried that with her. I didn’t understand it then but I saw those memories coming back to her firsthand; one of her cousins was giving birth a few years ago and my mom was one of the first people she called. My aunt needed her so my mom went (she also took me along). In real time, I saw my mom give my aunt every pain-relieving position you can imagine, every word of affirmation, every ounce of support and attention that she needed all those years ago. My mom has absolutely no medical education, but she has real life experience and sometimes that’s all a mother needs in the delivery room, someone who is going to attend to their needs.

Almost all maternal deaths are preventable. Most Black maternal deaths are the result of preeclampsia and eclampsia, high blood pressure and seizures caused by the high blood pressure.16 This is yet another example of how doctors do not listen to their patients, even when explicitly told that the mothers feel something wrong, as was the case with Shamony Gibson, a Black woman who died due to medical negligence, as documented in the film Aftershock.17 The documentary tells the story of the families of two Black women who were victims of maternal mortality, and how they found solace in each other while learning about the maternal mortality epidemic. The film used visual and linguistic modes of communication to showcase the severe impact maternal mortality has on families. An especially impactful scene depicts a gynecologist explaining how Shamony Gibson’s painful cry for help being brushed off was a direct result of racist medical tactics; the pain of a black woman in labor has never been taken seriously.18 The

film pans across a photo of a woman screaming in pain as the gynecologist is explaining how the foundation of the medical gynecology field is based on the myth that Black women do not feel pain. I’ve never given birth, nor do I have a medical background, but I am positive that all people actively pushing another body out of their own body definitely feel pain. This “unconscious bias” held by the doctors in the film should have been mitigated, it is through this way that the healthcare inequities can actually be diminished.19 The scene continues to describe how Black women, specifically enslaved people, were used for medical experiments and continue to be the largest population cared for by teaching hospitals (in which people who are still learning are the ones treating patients). Medical racism may look different today, but it still persists. I had to take breaks throughout the film to collect my emotions, even imagining my dad in Shamony’s partner’s shoes made my eyes well up. There are so many ways things could have gone differently that could have resulted in Shamony being alive.

I also wonder how different this issue would be if sex wasn’t held on such a high pedestal. I remember sitting in seventh grade health class when my teacher started to demonstrate how to properly put a condom on via bubble wand. She actually said, “This is just so I can abide by district policy, I know you good girls won’t have sex until you’ve met the perfect guy.” There are many things wrong with her sentence, the first being that we were a coed health class (she didn’t have to single the girls out) and another that she was very heteronormative about it, but the point is, she was supposed to tell us how to practice safe sex. Instead of doing that, she made sex a sort of forbidden fruit. People wanted to try it now since it was something so untouchable. This is very dangerous because people were then not equipped for pregnancy at all. The point of that unit in health class was to give knowledge of safe sex so that teenagers don’t get pregnant; she failed to do so and the teenagers weren’t just pregnant, they were uneducated pregnant people. They were people who had no idea you had to take vitamins for yourself let alone prenatal vitamins. Having “inadequate education” can literally cost someone their life, even though they just wanted to try this one thing.20 Now that I’m really thinking about it, I went to a public school that was so caught up in trying to stop teenagers from having sex and would try to scare us with the fear of pregnancy, that they never equipped anyone with knowledge on what to expect if you were to actually get pregnant. The public school system let people (that I had known my whole life) fend for themselves unknowledgeable and vulnerable.

I’m terrified of giving birth in America. I wish I could say I was scared in a regular, teenage girl way, but I’m scared in a “what if I feel something is wrong with me but no one takes me seriously” way. Everything from my zip code to my skin color, my social determinants of health (those aspects of my life that can give many people a clear picture of how hard it can be for me to be healthy), is telling me that never getting pregnant is the way to go about my life. I don’t want to get ahead of myself and say that I’ll never birth a child, but right now it’s looking that way. But I do see how I get the privilege of being able to have a choice in the matter. Even if I were to get pregnant right now, I could (with some difficulty but nonetheless I would be able to) get access to an abortion. This would actually be my safest option. Contraception is actually one of the best prenatal care options in reducing maternal morbidity and mortality rates.21 Planning your parenthood is important! While I’m important by myself, the effects that can present themselves if I were to have a complicated pregnancy and/or delivery can lead to “potentially lasting effects on women’s health over a life course or along family lines across generations.”22 So not only would I be putting myself in danger, the family that I was attempting to grow would also be put in danger. There is no winning, no fear subdued until the government pays attention to the fact that I, a nineteen year old Latina with no immediate urgency to start a family, is terrified to her bones of giving birth and being pregnant in America. When will my fear end?

Bibliography

Breaking the Mold: “Lanval” and “The Blue Bird”

Childish. Naive. Magical. These are usually the first thoughts in people’s minds when they hear the words fairy tale. From growing up on films like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, to playing games based on these concepts, or even reading their darker original texts, fairy tales have shaped numerous lives. But there is so much more to fairy tales than just that. Continue reading

Separated yet Together: A Roxbury Love Story

A photo essay:

Unity and Community: The Chinatown Mural

A photo essay.

Why Do We Need Handwriting in the Digital Age?

Some people possess the god-given talent of “neat handwriting.” Teachers marvel at their penmanship and friends regard them with awe, always prefacing their name with “the one with the super pretty handwriting.” Emma, my high school friend, possesses this gift. I would find myself gazing over her paper whenever she wrote anything, because her letters were so masterfully drawn that they were indistinguishable from computerized fonts; each a was the exact same size and shape as all the others, as if copy-pasted from an original, and every o a perfectly closed circle with no wobble or overlap. Once, I wrote the neatest sentence I could, painstakingly focusing on every tiny stroke and replicating my ideal handwriting, and then compared that to her normal handwriting. Turns out, hers still visually looked better than mine—it was naturally flowing, unlike my stiff and obviously forced penmanship. Stylistically, each of her letters were freestanding, unconnected, and separated with consistent gap sizes; by comparison, my handwriting style was more lax, as e’s and r’s slurred and linked with subsequent letters. If I wanted to improve my handwriting, I would need to discard my current writing habits and deliberately practice writing letters in a more uniform style. However, putting so much effort into slowing my writing speed and consciously imitating the neatness of Emma’s handwriting in every press of the pencil was simply unfeasible in my everyday life, as so much strain quickly tires out my hands and arms, and focusing on the quality of individual letters would fail in fast-paced lectures or timed exams which demand efficient handwriting. But that got me thinking: am I doing something wrong when it comes to manual writing? Is neat handwriting achievable through practice? Does a person’s handwriting style signify something about their character? And why might handwriting be beneficial or important in our everyday lives?

To start my exploration, I wanted to explore the validity of long-heard claims that handwriting is influenced by personality, intelligence, or inner thoughts: from the traditional notion that doctors have messy handwriting because they are incredibly smart, to the widely accepted belief that women have neater handwriting than men, or even the commonly heard assumption that introverts have smaller handwriting than extroverts, these generalizations came from all facets of life. To find an answer to whether personality traits could be distinguished through handwriting alone, I turned to the field of graphology. According to Encyclopedia Britannica Online, graphology is the study of personality as expressed in handwriting; it posits that the shape of letters and words opens a window into the writer’s subconscious.1 This science seems revolutionary: if how we talk gives listeners insight into how we are as a person, our handwriting styles may give the reader some clues about our character. Heinz M. Graumann, a graphologist who has researched and taught in the field for more than 60 years, observed that certain ways of writing the letters a and o can convey key traits in personality: a “closed” or “knotted” a or o may indicate someone who is secretive, while an a or o which is “opened” could mean the writer is careless or honest.2 However, Peter Greasley, a modern psychologist with a PhD from the University of Manchester, questions Graumann’s claims and the validity of graphologists’ ability to pinpoint personality from handwriting. He argues that these assertions are unfounded and based on weak correlations: that if certain letters are closed then so shall be your lips is an idea “drawing on simple analogies, perceptual metaphors, and spurious symbolism.”3 Furthermore, the accuracy of these analogies is also inconsistent, as Greasley mentions a study done by Neter and Ben-Shakhar in 1989, which found that “When dealing with handwriting samples containing personal information, the graphologists achieved some, albeit small, degree of success. However, when the graphologists were presented with handwriting samples that contained no personal details the predictive validity of their inferences was reduced to a level no better than random guesses.”4 Thus, graphology is not an accepted science at all—it is a pseudoscience, made up of beliefs that are not based on proven empirical evidence. What one graphologist discovers or concludes about handwriting would be contradicted by the findings of another.5 So, while everyone’s handwriting is unique, drawing inferences based only on its qualities is not a scientifically valid way to diagnose personalities.

I was encouraged by this new understanding that personality is independent from handwriting style, since this meant my writing was not determined by my psyche, but rather something more physical. Immediately, I turned my attention to the muscles in the arm which make manual writing possible. I wanted to explore the biological science behind the action of handwriting, and figure out what exactly made my natural writing so different from Emma’s. I had some initial thoughts on these topics.

For one, people may hold the pencil differently: I hold the pencil with the index finger on top, while others may hold it with both the index and middle fingers glued together and perpendicular to their thumb. Another source of variety is the amount of force used when writing different letters, and how readily the force is adjusted. In a study done led by Tiago H. Falk of the University of Toronto and Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, the variability of grip force—changes in pressure used on a pencil over time—was compared to the quality of handwriting—legibility, form, strokes, alignment, etc. Each of the pencils was strapped with sensors to detect how much force was used for each grip when writing the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” an English sentence which contains all the letters in the alphabet. While dynamic grip force for inexperienced writers was correlated with improved legibility, static grip force was associated with poorer performance in handwriting; on the other hand, for experienced writers, changes in their grip force resulted in incremental improvements in handwriting.6 In addition, previous studies cited that pencil grip did not influence stroke, legibility, or speed of writing; thus, quality—and variance of styles—of handwriting is determined by the “ability to change grip patterns during writing.”7 So, dynamic grip force leads to neater and higher quality handwriting in both proficient and non-proficient writers, whereas static grip force could be a cause for messy handwriting.

From Falk and his team of researchers, I gained an understanding as to where the different styles of handwriting come from, and how people are able to write so quickly yet neatly. I still wanted to understand why handwriting might be beneficial in our lives. After all, teachers seem to love neat and legible handwriting, as it is monumentally easier to read and grade compared to deciphering chicken scratch, which is both time-consuming and tiring. Though, neatness and messiness are also subjective: even among teachers, there are different preferences. I have had instructors ask us to write in large handwriting with clear gaps between letters, because students would write in the tiniest font, almost to the point of needing a magnifying glass to interpret. But does this preference for one kind of handwriting style actually have any real world implications, for example, in a classroom or academic setting?

In the same way that attractive people may receive greater advantages because of their physical appearance, a phenomenon denoted as “pretty privilege,” neat handwriting may share analogous benefits. One study, done by Rainer Greifeneder et al., educational psychologists and researchers from the University of Mannheim in Germany, coined the phrase “legibility bias,” which refers to the bias toward legible handwriting as having higher-quality content. Their results showed that “legible handwritten material may result in more positive evaluations than less legible material. This legibility bias occurred independent of performance level (good, medium, poor) and independent of subject domain (physics vs. education).”8 In other words, the visual aspect has a notable impact on graders’ opinions of the quality of content, such that a more legible paper may be of poorer quality but still receive the same score as another paper of higher quality which is less legible. This is especially crucial in academic environments, where a significant bulk of graded material is written by hand and also graded by a person, who is subject to these certain biases by virtue of being human. Thus, the legibility bias provides one clear incentive to practice and improve handwriting legibility and neatness: to present visually appealing work that positively reflects the quality of the written content.

Traversing from the field of graphology to the biomechanics of grip force, and now to the psychological effects of handwriting, I was not entirely satisfied with my findings about legibility bias and implications of handwriting in an academic environment. After all, in this electronic age, everyone’s work is visually the same due to online submissions and computerized fonts, so it seems the legibility bias may no longer be an issue. While graders might receive some psychological effect from reading someone’s handwritten work, is there a mental benefit of handwriting for the writers themselves? Why should we write by hand as opposed to other mediums of writing, such as a typewriter or a keyboard?

College students, myself included, take so many notes, manual or typed and with varying degrees of detail, that the very action of taking notes signifies academic success. Many professors and students believe in the superiority of making handwritten notes over typed notes, citing that the physical action of writing helps with better memory retention. This notion was recently corroborated by an experiment performed by Aya S. Ihara and other researchers from the Graduate School of Frontier Bioscience at Osaka University: “These results suggest that the movements involved in handwriting allow a greater memorization of new words. The advantage of handwriting over typing might also be caused by a more positive mood during learning. Finally, our results show that handwriting with a digital pen and tablet can increase the ability to learn compared with keyboard typing once the individuals are accustomed to it.”9 Writing by hand seems to be biologically more stimulating than typing for both memory and mood when it comes to learning. Even in everyday life, many people opt for handwritten notes as opposed to an electronic reminder, or prefer hard-copy books over e-books; a physical manifestation of writing has a far more profound effect on our brains.

Humans, as biological creatures, are dependent on our five senses for every action we take; memory is no different, as the more senses are utilized, the easier remembering is. I have heard study tips such as “work in a loud environment,” because when taking the test, it is not going to be completely quiet: the same environmental sounds help to stimulate our memory and make recalling them easier. Intuitively, then, handwriting would serve to be better for memory development too: when taking a physical exam, the sensory aspect—textures of the paper and pencil—and manual motion of writing helps the brain recollect tidbits of information previously formed using the same medium of writing. However, technology’s far reaching grasp has made handwriting and manual note-taking seem obsolete: the undeniable convenience and sheer efficiency of typing far trumps the marginal benefit we stand to gain from handwriting. Even still, I wonder what exactly is lost in our transition to the digital world. In David Abram’s selection “Animism and the Alphabet,” he describes the shift from orality to literacy and how it separated us from nature and made us indifferent to it.10 Now, we are once again in the middle of a shift, this time from handwriting to electronic typing, in which we may be even further away from the natural world. This sparked another question for me: why is it important that we keep the art of handwriting? What exactly makes handwriting so special, and what exactly will we lose in our transition away from it?

To understand handwriting as an art, I turned to my older sister Angela, who has a habit of collecting handwritten letters from family and friends, hanging them on an “aesthetic” wall or poster board, and displaying heartfelt messages with pretty decorations. An expert in artsy concoctions, she has a knack for creativity. She describes that something about receiving handwritten letters is infinitely more special than just reading an email: she would not print out an electronic message and paste it onto her scrapbooking wall, but would keep every handwritten letter she receives in the mail. A handwritten letter is more personal because no letter is identical; each person has a handwriting style that is different from everyone else’s, whereas the computer font is always the same—static and almost devoid of humanity. Even if the contents of two letters—one handwritten and the other electronically emailed—are entirely identical, just the existence of handwritten prose is proof of the thoughtfulness and care behind each stroke, making the first letter much more moving. This gave me insight into a special aspect of handwriting that electronic writing can not replicate: personal, heartfelt letters.

To explore further, I turned to Patrick McCormick and his magazine section “Keep those cards and letters coming,” which describes the art of writing letters and receiving them. He explains that the act of handwriting a letter is no easy feat: “Writing a good letter usually demands that we turn everything off and sit down for an hour or more with only a blank piece of paper (or computer screen) and ourselves for company…to construct our world and ourselves from within, and court, not fear, the experience of being alone.”11 When writing a letter, we isolate ourselves from the world and leave ourselves only with our thoughts, focusing on the person we are writing to and the sentimental feelings that arise from memories with them. The difficulty comes in being vulnerable with our own mind, relying only on our pen and paper to capture the affection and spark the creativity we wish to pour into the letter. However, all the toil is worth it when we receive a letter ourselves. As McCormick puts it, “How sweet it is to open a note and find that…a friend studying abroad has momentarily pushed aside his books and journals and put pen to paper to take up an old conversation and inquire how we are, how we really are.”12 A handwritten letter is so personal because the sender took time out of their day to think of and appreciate a friend, transcribing their moment of vulnerability into a tangible gift; they are presenting a part of themselves, and even if their handwriting is not the neatest, it is timelessly beautiful in the eyes of the receiver.

Going back to the original question that sparked my interest, I reflected on why handwriting is so important in our everyday lives. While handwriting may not be a fool-proof method at distinguishing introverts from extroverts or certain personality types from others, it does have its roots in psychology. Writing by hand comes naturally to us—inherent in our human nature—since we all desire to express ourselves in some way. In this digital age where everything on the internet is instantaneous and perpetual, those precious few things that are impermanent and fleeting become even more treasured. What sets it apart from something electronically typed is precisely the personal connection: that string of sentences, meticulously written down by its author, is laced with emotion and purpose in every stroke and lift of the pen. Handwriting reminds us to slow down our thoughts and treasure the present, because we are leaving behind a physical and lasting mark of our existence reflecting ourselves at that moment in time.

Bibliography

Notes

1. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “graphology.” Encyclopedia Britannica, April 25, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/topic/graphology.

2. Peter Greasley. “Handwriting Analysis and Personality Assessment.” European Psychologist 5, no. 1 (2000): 47.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 49.

5. Ibid., 45.

6. Tiago H Falk, Cynthia Tam, Heidi Schwellnus, and Tom Chau. “Grip Force Variability and Its Effects on Children’s Handwriting Legibility, Form, and Strokes.” Journal of Biomechanical Engineering 132, no. 11 (2010): 114504.

7. Ibid.

8. Greifeneder, Rainer, Sarah Zelt, Tim Seele, Konstantin Bottenberg, and Alexander Alt. “Towards a Better Understanding of the Legibility Bias in Performance Assessments: The Case of Gender-based Inferences.” British Journal of Educational Psychology 82, no. 3 (2012): 361-74.

9. Aya S. Ihara, Kae Nakajima, Akiyuki Kake, Kizuku Ishimaru, Kiyoyuki Osugi, and Yasushi Naruse. “Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words: Evidence From an N400 Event-Related Potential Index.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 15 (2021): 679191.

10. David Abram, “Animism and the Alphabet”, in The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.

11. Patrick McCormick. “Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming.” U.S. Catholic 60, no. 9 (1995): 38.

12. Ibid.

Grappling With Free Will

Many philosophers have struggled to make their philosophies align with the human concept of free will. Cosmology and the matter of religion are two areas in which contradictions arise between the belief in the distinctly human trait of free will and the belief in a higher power. Philosophers have taken many different approaches in their attempts to elucidate the matter of free will. Two philosophers who explain free will in the context of divine powers are the Roman Stoic Epictetus (55-135 CE) and the Christian philosopher Saint Augustine (354-430 CE). While both of these philosophers believed in the existence of God, their definitions of religion beyond this point diverge. Epictetus, on one hand, held the pantheistic belief that God is everywhere and in everything, and is inseparable from nature.1 Saint Augustine, on the other hand, believed after converting to Christianity that God is perfect and is the creator of all things and that he exists outside of the natural world.2 Within each of their respective religions Epictetus and Saint Augustine grapple with their belief in human free will and how humans came to possess such a quality. Despite the contrast between the religions of Pantheism and Christianity, the two philosophers’ explanations for how and why humans have been granted free will share many similarities.

In the form of Pantheism believed by Stoics, God is not separated from nature, and is therefore not concerned with human sin or prayers. Because of God’s existence within everything and everyone, Epictetus asserts that the human role in the universe is acting as a part of the whole. This “whole” in the pantheistic view is governed by reason, not chance. In Epictetus’s words, “The universe is powerful and superior and consults the best for us by governing us in conjunction with the whole”.3 This supports the Stoic belief that there is no difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be. However, if humans are simply acting as a part of the whole, this does not leave much room for the concept of self-determination. Self-determination, or the idea that humans have a conscious agency over their life, is not easily separated from the idea of free will.

To rectify this seeming contradiction, Epictetus brings Pantheistic beliefs together with the Stoic idea of duty. According to Epictetus and the Stoics, all humans have a duty to fulfill their role as a part of a greater whole. This duty, however, relies on the God-given gift of “The Will”, which distinguishes humans from all other life.4 Epictetus argues that God has given humans the faculty of decision so that they may use their will to fulfill their duty or go against it. Describing the nature of the will, Epictetus says “And what has the natural power of retraining the will? Nothing beyond itself, only its own perversion. Therefore in the Will alone is vice: in the Will alone is virtue”.5 Epictetus maintains that the will is something of divine creation, but that the ability to manipulate the will is purely human. It is in this context that Epictetus is able to insist upon the existence of free will as harmonious with God and nature.

Like Epictetus, the Christian Saint Augustine also believed that the divine power of God controlled the events of the universe, including granting humans free will. This is similar to the Pantheistic belief of the Stoics that it is not chance, but a greater plan that determines the course of life. However, Augustine has distinct ideas about the form of God and the ways in which he governs the universe. In Augustine’s view, God is a benevolent entity above all other things, and is the supreme decision-maker. Augustine says of God’s creations: “All things that exist, therefore, seeing that the creator of them all is supremely good, are themselves good”.6 As He is the decider of all things, it is also through God’s power that humans have the ability to become more or less good, according to Augustine. Augustine explains how humans are able to be influenced by outside temptations, saying, “But because they are not, like their Creator, supremely and unchangeably good, their good may be diminished and increased”.7 By asserting that humans are inconstant beings, Augustine lays the groundwork for explaining free will in the context of God.

Having established God’s omnipotence, Augustine describes how human free will is the work of God. The concept of human free will, by definition, insists upon the ability to act without the control of external forces. This, however, does not easily align with Augustine’s idea of a God who is all-knowing. In an attempt to rectify this contradiction, Augustine introduces the idea of multiple causation. In this idea, just because God knows all that you will do in this life does not mean he is causing you to do those things. By this logic, human choice is a human responsibility, despite the possibility of choice being God’s creation. This definition works to explain the existence of free will under an omnipotent and omniscient God but does not save the contradictions present in Augustine’s pronouncement that God is supremely good.

Based on Augustine’s assertions about God one would conclude that if he is truly benevolent and all-powerful then there would be no evil in the world. However, in the course of human history, people have often used their free will to commit evil acts or sins. In the pantheistic philosophy of Epictetus, the existence of a balance between good and evil causes no conflict. This is because, according to Epictetus, “All things serve and obey the [laws of the] universe; the earth, the sea, the sun, the stars, and the plants and animals of the earth”.8 In Epictetus’s Pantheism, the state of all things is in harmony with God, including the influence of human free will. In his Christian philosophy, however, Augustine must in some way account for the existence of evil in the world. He does this by arguing that although God’s divine plan is ultimately good, he intentionally allows some evil in the world to achieve his benevolent plan.

In Augustine’s view, the all-knowing God must have virtuous intentions behind allowing the existence of evil in the world because God himself is undeniably good. Here, Augustine asserts a similar concept to that of Epictetus, explaining the balance and harmony of God’s plan. Both Epictetus and Augustine maintain that it is through God’s power that both good and evil exist in nature. However, in Augustine’s explanation, any evil allowed by God is a means to serve the greater good. Specifically, in the context of humans, Augustine explores the reasoning behind God’s allowance of the possibility of sin in human nature. He states that “The will of God, which is always good, is sometimes fulfilled through the evil will of man”.9 Through the insistence on God’s ultimate plan serving only the good, Augustine is able to amend the inconsistencies between a benevolent and omnipotent God and the existence of human free will and sin.

Epictetus and Saint Augustine practiced different philosophies in wildly different time periods, and their religious beliefs of Pantheism and Christianity do not align in many ways. Epictetus believed in a God that was harmonious with nature and that lived as a part of all things. Saint Augustine, on the other hand, believed in a supreme God that existed above all life, and that held the power of supreme knowledge and benevolence. These religious differences impacted the way the two philosophers grappled with the concept of human free will. Despite these differences, however, the assertions of each philosopher on how and why humans possess free will have striking similarities. In both philosophers’ views, human free will is a gift from God. And in both Epictetus’s and Augustine’s beliefs, this gift of free will must agree with the Pantheistic laws of the universe or the Christian divine providence of God.

Work Consulted

Notes

1. Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus, t.r. T.W. Higginson, Boston, Little, Brown, 1866.

2. Augustine, Enchiridion, t.r. J.F. Shaw, from The Works of Aurelius Augustine, vol. IX, Rev. Marcus Dods, ed., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1892.

3. Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus, p427.

4. Ibid., p179.

5. Ibid., p179.

6. Augustine, Augustine, Enchiridion, p182.

7. Ibid., p182.

8. Epictetus, The Works of Epictetus, p427.

9. Augustine, Augustine, Enchiridion, p246.