CONFESSIONS
The tiniest handwriting in the world.
I don’t have to make myself small to be good.
In the summer of 2012, I spent five weeks making short films with a group of international students in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
I was twenty years old, and had worked hard to maintain recovery from an eating disorder so I would be healthy enough to go.
Still, my self-concept was shaky, and I often felt like an outsider to my team. Having been homeschooled most of my life, I didn’t always get their cultural references. My knowledge of music and movies was at least five years behind theirs, and I wasn’t as good at connecting with people as they all seemed to be.
I was in a foreign country, feeling like a foreigner in more ways than one.
There was a girl on my team with the same name as me. She was one of my roommates; pretty, tall, and slender, with a sweet singing voice and a gentle heart. She seemed near-perfect to me. She was popular with everyone, had a good family compared to my dysfunctional one, and appeared to have the strong faith in God that I had long struggled to attain.
A few weeks into our trip, we realized we both had a crush on the same guy. We agreed we would try not to make a big deal about it. Emotions run high on a trip like this one: fifteen college kids crammed onto the fifth floor of a little hotel, doing everything together day and night, running on adrenaline and potent Ethiopian coffee.
But I couldn’t help noticing that the other L and this guy were hanging out a lot together, always falling to the back of the group to talk whenever we went out into the muddy streets of the city. It became obvious that of the two of us, he preferred her.
Soon, everyone on the team knew they liked each other. And I was the odd one out yet again.
I had prayed I would meet my soulmate on this trip. Instead, I was watching it happen to someone else.
Sometimes, after a long day, the girls on my team would hang out in the common area of our hotel and write in our journals together. I couldn’t help but notice that the other L’s handwriting was exceedingly small — possibly the tiniest handwriting I had ever seen. Other people noticed too, and would exclaim over her minuscule letters flowing uniformly across the page.
My own handwriting is good but unpredictable, and subject to shifts in my mood. It vacillates between print and cursive, never making up its mind; it sprawls across lines or crowds itself together; it changes size and style and slant from day to day.
But for a long time after taking that trip — after the other L went home and married the boy from our film team — I tried to make my handwriting tiny, just like hers.
It was like some unconscious belief had sprung up in me that if I could just be a little bit more perfect and delicate, if I could make myself as good as she was, someone would finally choose me too.
But eventually, I started to question this belief.
Why was I trying to force myself into this little box that did not belong to me? Who was I trying to impress? What did it say about what I believed about myself, that I was putting on someone else’s attributes to do something as personal as write in my own journal?
I believed I was chaotic, messy, and uncontrollable.
I believed I had to make myself small to prove my own goodness.
And I believed I was not good enough as I was.
Now, I embrace the shifting tides of my personal penmanship.
Big or small, looping or stick-straight, chaotic or precise or all of the above across a single page, my words are my words, and they’re beautiful however I show up to write them.
I don’t need to have the tiniest handwriting in the world to be good.
I’m good enough just as I am.
Though I’m thankful for my experience in Ethiopia, I no longer agree with or support the type of mission work that this trip involved. If you’d like, you can read more about that here.
This article is solely for informational purposes and represents the writer’s personal opinion. Please seek professional advice if required.
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