Dot the i’s with circles

My sister had a book on handwriting analysis that I stumbled across in 4th grade. Being a gullible kid, I believed every word — that my aggressively-crossed t’s indicated that I was a braggart, while the backward slant of my l’s said I was introverted and shy.

I’m not denying that I was all those things at once, but what a thing to put on paper for other people to see!

Handwriting and I were not good companions, anyway. I’d just come off of two laborious years of barely passing my handwriting classes. Remember those? They’d force kids to go from printing to cursive writing and then complain that it was sloppy. Have you ever in your life encountered cursive writing that was easier to read than printed letters? Isn’t the entire point of it to speed you up, at the loss of decipherability?

So, just in case I became famous, I decided not to leave behind any “aha” clues for future generations like the case studies of Napoleon that this book started with.

My logic went like this – if these experts could tell my personality by keying in on my sloppy lettering, why not reverse that? I picked out several traits that seemed cool to have and taught myself to write like that.

So my letters started slanting forward to show people I was a positive thinker. My initial caps loomed larger, showing I was bold, adventurous. And my hearts earned cute little circles for the dots, the sign of an artistic mind.

Did it work? Honestly, I have no idea. My handwriting is so terrible people constantly ask whether I was born left-handed and was forced to change (I wasn’t). But I’ll tell you this: if future generations try to figure me out, they’re in for some confusing twists!