On developing your signature
Repetitive self love
It’s been a winter of sorting through the clutter.
I came across a lot of old identification.
The first?
My Social Insurance Card.
Issued to me in 1978, it has my ‘signature’ from 1978.
And that signature, dear reader, is about as familiar to me as I was at six years old.
Printed in shaky scrawl, it looks nothing like my signature today. The letters are a forced, practice cursive, struggling to stay within the little white bubble provided.
It looks like I must have felt attempting to conform to the expectations of the world.
And despite the straining nature of the letters on the plastic, there’s something open and hopeful about my writing then.
The next two pieces of ID were close in terms of age.
The first was my grade 12 high school ID
The letters there were more drawn out and playful. It looks like a young person’s idea of what an adult signature might look like.
The next card was from a mere three years later. It’s the ID card from my second year at Dalhousie University. By then, I was signing my name in all lowercase. Not because I was a socialist, which I likely was, but because it looked so much more playful that way.
My signature was playful with the ‘j’ at the beginning of ‘jim’ looking like a wink and the ‘d’ at the end of ‘dalling’ looking like a bit of a smirk.
These days, my signature is little more than a squiggle, an afterthought.
Most of the time, I sign documents online.
Recently, I signed my employment offer for the tour guide job. Using Docusign, I made one quick squiggle then repeated it multiple times to say that I read things that I really didn’t read.
It felt more like the end user agreement of an iPhone update rather than a contract.
I miss signing my name.
Back in 1995 when we toured Canadian high schools, they treated us like rockstars.
Can we get your autographs?
Sure, we’d say, then sign their t-shirts or day planners.
But then?
We’d get them to sign our banner.
Over the course of five months, we performed in hundreds of schools in front of tens of thousands of students.
Over that time we signed our names more times than I can remember.
And our banner?
By the end of the tour, our once white banner was essentially black with ink.
Recently, both of my children had to sign some documents. Their signatures reminded me of the one on my old Social Insurance Card.
They looked practiced and strained.
I wanted give them a hundred page notebook and say Go! Write your name over and over again. Turn it into faces, bunnies and other pictures. Sign your name until you love how it looks on the page!
Because that’s how we discover our signature.
We write our names over and over again, long past boredom. We sign our names until we like how they look on the page.
The same can be said for a ‘signature’ dish that we cook. We do it again and again until it’s nature and it just tastes like us.
Same with writing blog posts, photography - anything really.
To develop a signature that you love, it takes time and repetition.
But most of all?
You gotta do it until you just love how it ‘looks’.
And perhaps once you love your signature, loving yourself might not be that far behind.
Keep on keeepin’ on, you fools!