Part One: Exercises

September 10, 1990

My graphological self-therapy begins today. This method (suggested a while ago by a crazy friend) stems from the notion—which is central to graphology—that there’s a profound connection between a person’s handwriting and his or her character, and from the behaviorist tenet that changes in behavior can lead to changes on a psychological level. The idea, then, is that by changing the behavior observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to change other things about that person.

My aims at this stage of the therapeutic endeavor are fairly modest. At first, I’m going to practice writing by hand. I won’t be attempting calligraphy, but I’ll at least try to manage a script that anyone could read—myself included, because these days my writing’s often so bad that not even I can decipher it.

Another of my immediate aims is to develop large, expansive handwriting in contrast to my microscopic scrawl of recent years. A further, more ambitious aim is to make my writing more uniform, since at the moment I mix cursive script and printed letters quite arbitrarily. I’ll try to remember how each letter is written by hand, more or less the way I learned in school. The idea is to achieve a kind of continuous writing, “without lifting the pen” in the middle of words. I think this will help me improve my concentration and the continuity of my thoughts, which are currently all over the place.

September 11

Day two of handwriting therapy. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I gave the page I’d written to Alicia and she found it easy to read. Now I’m trying to do three things: (1) keep the letters to a suitable size, (2) get back to real handwriting, without printed letters creeping in all the time, and (3) not lift my pen—that is, only dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s once I’ve finished writing the whole word. This last point might be the most difficult, though the “real” handwriting isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

At first, looking at what I’ve written so far and comparing it to what I wrote yesterday, there seems to be some progress. Today’s writing, however—though larger and more legible—reveals a certain nervousness; I’m writing more quickly now than I was yesterday. But I also notice that the letters are more “separate,” more spaced-out within each word, less bunched together than before. As if each one had recovered its individuality. All in all, I’m happy with today’s work and the improvements from yesterday. I know I’m still a long way from achieving my goals, even the most basic ones; I know I still can’t remember how to write some capital letters and some lowercase ones. But everything will come with time.

September 24