My writing style has always been a little different. Probably because I see the words in my head even when I speak. It is like self-captioning. It can trip me up sometimes because when I am fatigued the words that are in the captioning fall flat or are replaced by synonyms when I speak or, more interestingly, swap words. I usually catch it and then fix it, much like backspace/delete on a computer keyboard and then keep on going. Typing has always been natural to me, as I can rather easily type what I see in my head as if I am speaking. I used to write, and have always written, but it would trail-off or be difficult to read later. I tried shorthand but it only worked so well. So, when I went to university, I got a grant to get a computer so I could type my notes, be able to pay better attention in class. It helped I was already familiar with computers and could type a mile a minute. So, I started typing for my classes. I have entire scripts, basically, of classes I attended. Eventually I took on a note-taking job to help out others with disabilities, and they loved my notes. My notes became so well known in Rural Sociology that when the professor held a ceremony at the end of the year (it was a full year course), I was awarded “most prolific note-taker”. The detail in which I was able to capture the important parts of the classes was really neat. As I have a visual memory, I can often recall where something was on a page by virtual positioning. It is easier to remember items on print paper than electronic, but that could be because I am comfortable with physical objects but it could also be the way my brain remembers light on a computer screen. Paper has a different visual frequency than screens.
I typed a lot of song lyrics on the Hercules computer I had, transcripting them so I could better understand the songs. I eventually went from writing my poems to typing them out. I would print them off to archive them… many are fading now though as some are more than 20 years old. Writing has always been important to me. It gave me another way to communicate with the world. It gave me entertainment that other people got through televisions. I tell you, watching friends for the first time ever with subtitles in your 30s is shocking and hindsight gets a little clearer vision: a whole lot of things made sense for the first time ever. Popular culture was usually just out of my reach, and that was a social barrier. One attempt to overcome this was through working at Blockbuster Video in the last half of my undergrad where my visual memory served very well. It is quite honest that people would ask for videos based off a vague location of where they saw it and something that caught their eye on the jacket of the DVD case. I had a lot of fun finding that elusive video for people so they could enjoy their evening. Those were my simpler days, back when living off 2000$ was actually possible. No, it’s double that now with all the debts from the years when 2000$ was supposedly enough. But that is another topic altogether.
Typing has been my ticket to education and years of work. Introducing typing to classes was one of the best ideas of my generation. My first typing class was in Grade 7 or 8. I had already had more exposure than usual to computers like Vic20 and Commodore64, learning ASCII. Come late middle school, it was DOS time. I helped my Mom with WordPerfect here and there for their businesses. By the time I was finishing high school, I was a volunteer in the elementary school computer lab for Grade 3/4 students. Now my son at five years old plays those same games as I assisted 20 years ago, on a touch screen. The evolution of such a simple thing such as typing is absolutely amazing. Typing was one considered a luxurious item, barely affordable to the masses and now it is a technology that has made my life as a person with disabilities amazingly easier.
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