What Making By Hand Means To Me

You’ll find my attempt at a post with the aforementioned title, as suggested by James via our post title trade! He wrote The way I think about a song.

Read more about the initiative, or contact me if you’d also like to trade!

If ones and zeroes run through your blood, how do you reconcile that with the physical world?

Like how I oscillate between countries and continents, I swing between different frequencies of handmade vs digital creativity, and things I make.

The longer I’m in one place, the more things I make by hand. I suppose it’s because I can collect reams of paper scraps and squirrel them away. Perhaps it’s also because when I send mail, I don’t need to wait months to see the physical reply.

I adore the web, but the urge for paper is intense, almost carnal. Books were my first great love. Faced with a world I struggled and failed to understand (and still wrestle with) I escaped into books. Piles and piles I would bring home from the library and devour them all.

I made my first twelve zines the way I love most: starting with an A4 page and covering it with scraps, pen scribbles, stickers, and whatever else made sense to slap on with a glue stick. I’ve made another two zines since then digitally with Canva, and though I could experiment much more with typography and interesting effects...it didn’t capture my attention the same way.

I don’t know how many things I’ve made. Dozens? Hundreds? Near a thousand? There are gods’ eyes the size of a small coffee table hanging on walls in the United Kingdom, artist trading cards taped to the bout of an acoustic guitar in Australia, sketches tucked in a jean back pocket in Spain, art from the last almost decade littered across my grandparents walls.

Kevin Roose, in his book, Futureproof, calls it leaving fingerprints. Traces of my existence. Proof I lived or existed or contributed in some small, positive way to people’s lives.

It’s heartwarming. It’s intoxicating. It’s everything.

When I exist on the internet, as I do most of the day...I forget I exist, but it never feels...right. It helps to have no social media, and having a near complete lack of interest in YouTube videos, and a hosts file blocklist a near mile long, and yet...it’s an existence without an anchor.

Or maybe I’m twenty-something and still listless, and this is just a symptom.

When you do everything from write novels to email friends to trawl Wikipedia to work from the same window, in tabs that increasingly look the same...how do you separate them?

They say handwriting is a dying skill, no longer taught at school for time spent typing. I went to primary school in the early 2010s and my regional school couldn’t decide whether to teach cursive or block lettering. I write in a strange hybrid, a running scrawl, all loops and unintentional flourishes. Unintelligible if I’m not careful.

When I type, it’s still me writing the words, but...I find on paper I’m more genuine, more informal, less prone to philosophical tangents, yet more verbose, less...overwrought. Or it might be because the only handwriting I do now is letters to strangers and friends.

I’m hesitant to use the word sacred when I describe the experience of handwriting, but that’s what it feels like. Transcendent, perhaps? Or coming home to myself. Is that more accurate?

Maybe that’s what making things by hand means to me.

Reminding myself to come up for a breath from the datasea, reconnecting with the reality of being a human animal alive in this beautiful world.

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