The Decline & Fall of Mail, Handwriting and My Empty Mailbox

In highschool and college, I was one of the best pen pals anyone could hope to have. I was constantly writing — postcards, ten or twenty page letters, handwritten photocopied zines — you name it. The carefully miniaturized versions of my script crammed onto hundreds of mixtape sleeves if one. I had semi-regular correspondences with everyone from old friends to random people I met traveling or listened to (back then, you could just write Blake Schwarzenbach and tell him you like “Kissed the Bottle” and he’d write you back, on kitty-cat stationary, and it would be like you’d always been pals, not unlike the way I can friend Thurston Moore on Facebook and he’ll friend me back). I wrote to Dishwasher Pete after years of reading his zine, having laughed my ass off at his friend Jess (another eventual pen pal) for pretending to be him on David Letterman (watch that here). Point being, I loved writing and getting mail, but I never seemed to get enough. Things took too long, I got impatient. I went through a string of long-distance boyfriends while in Maryland and Arkansas and saved everything … waiting for the mail was a painful but thrilling process.

My handwriting was never that great. I worked at it, but I spent years imitating other people’s more consistent, special handwriting and never really knew what my own was until much later. It started with Marissa in fifth grade. She had impeccable soft, round writing, tight curves, consistent distance and unmistakable femininity. Later, it was Hannah who’s writing wooed me. Hers was significantly more masculine, small, even. She wrote like an architect, and it was totally enviable. Her notes from class looked like elaborate charts – everything laid out as if a ruler had been pressed to the paper. I eventually said fuck it, after years of failed handwriting imitation, and come to love my own handwriting, a sort of sloppy and impatient testament to Joyce’s antagonistic scribbles. It’s small, nearly illegible, and neat only in that its consistently difficult in the same places. I have to work to leave legible notes for people.

Many folks attribute their awful handwriting to the computer age. I can’t – I’m pretty sure my writing has always been some version of awful, unless I was trying to compensate for it by living up to someone else’s natural gift for the art. Maybe I thought that what I had to say would seem more interesting if the medium was attractive, or maybe I was just generally insecure and compensated by imitating things that I was envious of. Who knows. All I know is that my handwriting has declined in recent years, but it’s definitely not entirely because of how much time I spend typing – it also has to do with my acceptance of my natural penmanship.

The upside is that my mailbox is always full, despite not ever writing anyone (a travesty I intend to rectify). That’s due to my job, so I can’t really take the credit. I did decide recently, however, that if I was writing press releases for a living, I’d start doing hand-written ones, just to practice. And hell, maybe my awful penmanship would prove intriguing.