I started this post in October of 2022. I was planning to write about writing today (to get points for writing for Finch — maybe I’ll post about Finch later!). My therapist wants me to actually *write* in hopes of getting a writing career going, so let’s resurrect and finish this post.
All through my childhood, I was told that if I wanted to become a professional writer, which I did, I should keep a journal.
This was quite possibly the worst advice I’d ever been given in my life. You see, I had pretty serious deficits in coordination as a kid, and the adults in my life seemed to think that it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough or something.
Turns out that I may have an actual neurological disorder. I wonder how I’d go about getting tested for that.
So, since I have this coordination disorder, in the era before computers, trying to get me to write longhand was a losing proposition. Holding a pen was physically painful for me.
I legit had a teacher walk up behind me and pick up my whole arm by lifting my pen. “You don’t have to hold on to it that tightly. It’s not going to run away from you.”
That’s lovely. I wasn’t afraid it’d run away. I just couldn’t control the pen enough without a tight grip.
Oh, and when I thought that college might not be for me (I eventually got a bachelor’s degree, a post-bachelor’s paralegal certificate, and a master’s degree) my mom tried to talk me into going into occupational therapy assistant (a career training certificate program at my junior college) because she felt it would be *so* rewarding to help people who had strokes to learn to tie their shoes again. This did not strike me as something I wanted to do.
As fate would have it, do you know who you see about the kind of coordination problems I have? An occupational therapist. Helping kids with problems like mine with those problems? May well have been a winning argument back then.
Alas, I never saw an occupational therapist and so that career field never appealed to me.
I had so many ideas for writing, but it *hurt*.
That’s also part of why my grades were lackluster. Let’s take the girl for whom writing hurts, and make her do pointless nonsense writing exercises, like doing write-ups of the canned science experiments we did in junior high science class. We had to put the materials used, and the steps we took, and the results, and the conclusion for every single one (and we had one almost every day). Like, we all did exactly the same thing with the same materials and came to the same conclusions. Why am I enduring this discomfort for this?
And don’t get me started on the Bible journal that we were supposed to keep my Freshman year of high school.
Now that I have a nice keyboard with keys I don’t have to slam (like I did with my mom’s manual typewriter), I get *so* much more writing done.
I’m going to try writing about writing again tomorrow (maybe about my history with computers and how they helped me become a better writer?). Let’s see if that works out. Wish me luck!