Ever since I was a young boy in 7th grade, I have loved erasable ink pens. I never connected that love with my ADHD before, but recent evidence has shown me they’re inseparable.
When I was younger, I didn’t so much write as much as I skipped, crashed, and tumbled with a pen across the page. Somehow my attempts at cursive would drop a letter or add an extra loop depending on how distracted or excited I was at the moment. My writing was filled with crossed out mistakes as well as corrections squeezed in on the tops and sides. It was a mess.
Then Heaven sent me EraserMates. Suddenly, I could correct my constant mistakes in penmanship. I used EraserMates all through Junior High and High School. By the end of High School, however, I had switched from cursive to printed letters in all caps. It was slower, but it was also less prone to error. Even then the erasable pen was my pen of choice. I lived with the smeary ink and the blue pinky finger because I knew the trade off was worth it. I could correct my constant typos and goofs.
Mistakes G̸o̸r̸e̸ Galore
You know the kind. Complete sentences written only in your head, but somehow left off the paper. Writing music lyrics or snippets of conversation from around you accidentally into your prose. Dropped words. Complete changes of subject that ripped the readers brain in a 90° angle away from the point. My written page was an exercise in literary torture. An erasable pen was like magic for those moments. I could scrub away my mistakes and leave only a ghostly smear to mark their existence.
By the early 90s I was doing everything on computer, so programs with Autosave and Undo were my new miracles. But I still needed the ability to erase my written mistakes. When my kids entered school I tried to share my excitement with them about erasable ink, but the oldest two had no interest. Then my third daughter took to them like a viral video on Facebook . Curiously, she also had mild ADHD. She discovered she loved erasable ink for all the same reasons I did.
Fortunately for her, there is a veritable cornucopia of erasable pens on the market these days. This is a boon for you, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment