"This month’s column isn’t about prison. It’s about a persistent theme in my life: my handwriting.

Many, many people claim to be unable to read it and one person recently has gone so far as to label it “Hieroglyphic Chicken Scratch.” Members of my family refuse to communicate with me by mail (because they can’t read it) and friends whom I love dearly beg me not to write to them because it makes their eyes water and heads hurt. Okay. So I grant you I have unusual handwriting, but then I have an unusual history.

I first learned to form my letters in Canada. I then went to school in Switzerland where they form their letters quite differently. For example, their 1’s look like 7’s to Americans and their 6’s look like G’s. They use periods for commas and commas for decimal points and they use all sorts of curlicues. The Swiss insisted I convert to their European style and so I did.

Following Switzerland I went to school in England where they, in turn, forbid me to use either the Canadian or the Swiss styles of lettering. For a third time I learned a new way to form letters, which I was only allowed to form with a fountain ink pen.

Many years later in Virginia, I attended a business school where I took a now defunct class called speedwriting. At the time it was a vastly improved form of shorthand. Unlike shorthand, which uses symbols a person must memorize, speedwriting uses modified letterforms. Eagerly I embraced this system since speedwriting gave me the tools to write at almost the speed of thought. My handwriting reshaped itself again.

Next came prison where I took a drafting class. The very first lesson in drafting is learning the skill of single-stroke Gothic lettering. (For you old timers, yes, I know how to letter with a LeRoy Ink set, I can letter with nothing but an Ames lettering guide and I can use templates. I have exquisite single stroke lettering if you have a week for me to make a note of anything.) Up until this moment in prison, all of my correspondence had been conducted on a typewriter, but then a death row inmate, a man who was executed, left a letter with his attorney describing how he had a gun stashed on death row, in his cell, in his typewriter. In response, the authorities did not close death row, they did not ban guns; they eliminated typewriters. Suddenly I could no longer type. All I had was my historically rich handwriting. Thus began the moaning and complaining. (There are people who can read my handwriting without problem. I’ve seen them do it. My students manage to learn to decipher the code. So those who are properly motivated acclimate).

I have had people say to me that it was arrogant on my part not to make an effort to writ more legibly. It may appear as such, but the handwriting they are reading is in fact my good printing and not my authentic cursive that I use when I write for myself. I do make an effort to write larger and slower but when I start to write, my thoughts tumble out onto the paper and I forget about the mechanics of writing and lose myself in the telling.

In the end, I’ve realized that my contorted handwriting is a by-product of many years of trying to please people who were not interested in my development, but who insisted on imposing themselves on me. If my teachers had encouraged me to have a neat clean style rather than force me to write to their parochial lettering standard, my handwriting might not be so malformed. My handwriting unfolds as a witness to a lesson in being true to oneself rather than shaping and reshaping oneself to win the approval of others–to please them–to meet artificial standards.

Yes, we all have to conform to a certain standard for civilization to exist, but some social edicts (corsets, feet binding) merely deform us. We need to be encouraged to grow into our best individual selves rather than broken into cramped images of each other. So I tell you, dear readers, my scribbles are not chicken scratches but chickens with pluck!" (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, April 19, 2007)

An index to Elizabeth Haysom's columns may be found at Glimpses from Inside.