There was a version of your handwriting that was practiced. You were graded on it. Someone stood over you with a worksheet and made you do the loops correctly and keep the letters the right size and stay between the lines. You developed something consistent, something legible, something that was recognizably yours. That version peaked somewhere around fourth grade and has been in quiet decline ever since.
The problem is you stopped practicing without deciding to stop practicing. The keyboard arrived, then the phone, then everything requiring a pen became a form, a signature, a grocery list written in a hurry on the back of an envelope. The handwriting didn’t disappear, it just went unexercised, and now when you actually have to write something by hand it comes out looking like a different person wrote it — someone vaguely related to you, someone who learned the same letters but differently, someone whose r’s have given up and whose s’s are anyone’s guess.
Signatures are their own category of deterioration. Your signature used to be legible. At some point it became a single flowing gesture that contains maybe two actual letters surrounded by implication. Banks accept it. The DMV accepted it. It represents you legally and it looks like you drew a wave with your elbow. Nobody questions this. The signature has fully decoupled from the name it’s supposed to stand for and we’ve all agreed to pretend otherwise.
What gets me is finding old handwritten things — a letter, a card, notes from a class. The handwriting is better. More careful. More like a person was trying. You can see the effort in it, the deliberateness of someone who still believed that the physical shape of their letters said something about them. It did say something. It said they were paying attention to the act of writing, that writing was still an act rather than just output.
I wrote a birthday card last week and had to slow down so much it felt like a different kind of work. My hand remembered the shapes but needed time to find them. The card looked okay. The person said it was nice. I don’t think they were looking at my handwriting. But I was. I know what it used to be. I know exactly when I stopped caring enough to keep it.