## Metadata - Author: [[Carolyn Roy-Bornstein]] - Full Title: The Brevity Blog - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[Misc./Funny/Writing]] - Summary: The author shares her experience of hand-sewing and writing by hand, connecting with the process and finding it grounding. She reflects on the physical and mental benefits of these manual activities compared to using machines or computers. The act of stitching and writing by hand brings a sense of connection, creativity, and memory that technology may not provide. - URL: https://brevity.wordpress.com/ ## Full Document [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/headshot-.jpg) When my foster daughter recently got a job as an assistant veterinary technician at a local animal hospital, she bought a brand-new pair of scrubs. Because she is petite, they needed to be shortened. Janine climbed onto a stool at our kitchen counter and turned in a slow circle while I measured and basted, some of the common pins in my mouth rusty from lack of use. After everyone had left for work, I sat down on the couch to hem. I hadn’t done any hand-sewing in some time and found my eyesight not quite up to the task. Just to thread the needle, I had to move my head closer to, then farther from my work, then squint my eyes to peer through my lashes, then close one eye altogether. I pricked my fingertip with a pin as I forced it through the thick fabric of the seam. I burned another digit while ironing the edge of the material that would be folded into the hem. I’ve been sewing by machine for years, but I grew up hand sewing at my grandmother’s knee—whip stitches edging felt purses with yarn handles, buttonhole stitches on tiny doll clothes. That muscle memory gradually took over, my catch stitches now neatly overlapping Vs like a tiny mountain range along the bottom of each pant leg. After I’d pressed the pants and hung them in the closet, I picked up the notebook and pen I was using to draft the next chapter of my work-in-progress. No muscle memory needed here. I’ve always written first drafts by hand. Old school. The long way, as I will later have to enter all those written-out words into the computer. The hard way, since I sometimes struggle to decipher my own scribbles. It’s not that I have poor penmanship (although I am a retired physician, and we are notoriously indecipherable in our writing). It’s that when I am excited—when words and ideas are coming fast—my hand moves in sync with my emotions, flying like a toddler struggling to keep up with a sibling on a bike. The result can be a bit of a mess. Still, there is something basic—something grounding and affirming—about doing things by hand. Something that connects my body to my mind in a way my computer keyboard or my electric sewing machine just doesn’t. I can look back at the stars and circles and empty checklist boxes and know just where my “rabbit holes” are. Where I need to return and expand my thoughts. I can see my cross-outs, too, and know which rabbits I’ve already pursued down those holes unfruitfully. I recently read a study demonstrating that when people write by hand, their brains grow more neural networks than people who tap away on a computer. As an artist, I like the idea of my visual and motor and sensory cortexes lighting up with connection, alive with dendritic growth. As I work on the scrubs, I can see the progress of my stitching, hesitant and awkward as my fingers remember what they’re doing; even and neat by the end of the second leg. Writing, too, falls into place the longer I keep my pen moving across the page. As the furious pace of new ideas and nascent concepts develops into more cogent themes, my pen slows down. I relax into the project. I know where I’m going and I’m legible again. Working by hand also leaves something of an *aide-mémoire*. Even though my sewing room is littered with pincushions and thread and scraps of lopped-off extra cloth, in the closet hang the fresh-pressed finished outcome. Likewise, my notebooks stacked in piles on closet shelves are physical mnemonics of where I was when I wrote each paragraph. I dashed out the ending to that dementia story after driving home in a wicked rainstorm. I had to hold the throughline of that retirement piece in my mind until I could get off my paddleboard and get it onto the page. My fingers have their own after-effects. Pricks and burns from sewing. Dents on the left side of my index finger and the right side of my thumb from writing. Even though I hadn’t sewn by hand in years, I had fallen into a rhythm hemming those scrubs. What felt like a painful task ultimately flowed into a rewarding cadence. Stitch by stitch, the fruits of my labor now await Janine’s first day of work. Meanwhile, a version of this essay will always exist in a notebook with stars and arrows and x-ed-out paragraphs. As I wrote, I trusted that a more pristine version would eventually sit neatly formatted on a screen—that word by word, my messy pages would become a coherent thesis out in the world, the result of hands and head working together, my brain a veritable fireworks display of happy connection. \_\_\_ **Carolyn Roy-Bornstein** is a retired pediatrician and the writer-in-residence at the Lawrence Family Medicine Residency program. Her work has appeared in the *Washington Post*, the *New York Times*, the *Boston Globe, JAMA, Poets & Writers, The Writer* magazine, and many other venues. Her latest book *Writing Through Burnout: How to Thrive While Working in Healthcare* is forthcoming. [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/olgamecking.jpg) [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/bussel-headshot.jpeg) [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/olga-katsovskiy_photo_2024.jpg) [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ona-at-incorrigibles-exhibit-.jpg) [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/truth-arrow.jpg) [](https://brevity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/almond.jpg)