Handwriting and Mental Health

Photo by Md Mahdi on Unsplash

Our mental health has a link to many things. It can make or break the way our stomach works. There have been links to acne and behavior. There is a connecting line through many different areas in our lives thanks to the state of which our mental health lingers.

One of those things, I’m learning, is the link between mental health and handwriting.

It may seem silly and insignificant. Why, in the day in age when we use computers for everything, does it matter what a person’s handwriting looks like? If you’ve graduated from high school and college what does it matter what handwriting looks like? Who still picks up a pen and writes on paper for anything other than their signature?

Inherently I’m a writer.

I was four years old the first time I handed my older sister a blank notebook and a crayon and asked her to write down the story that was in my head. I guess you can say that writing has always been in my blood. I should have known early on that it would ultimately be exactly what I wanted to do with my life. The point here is not my goals for the future. The point here is the fact that I’ve noticed that over the past month in a half my handwriting has shown major improvement.

Let me put it this way. To fall asleep at night, I usually write. I work on fiction that swims through my head during the day. I write down those pictures to read back on the nights when I can’t sleep. Fiction is my happy place.

Over the past few nights, my way of writing has been in notebooks with my favorite pen. I’ve been able to shut the computer and tack down my thoughts in a notebook. What I hadn’t realized until the past few nights was how much more confident and comfortable my handwriting has started to look. My mental health is reflected in the comfortable loop to the letters. My messy dotted i’s don’t show reflections of hurt. I’m slowly evening out all of the trauma that’s been in my head for the past seven years.

There have been a lot of changes in the past year and a half. Changes that I want to write about and sort out. Partly for myself, partly to show others who might be in the same predicament that it’s okay and they’re not alone. That’s always been my goal. To write something that makes someone feel a little less hopeless.