I guess they won’t exchange the gifts
That you were meant to keep
- Leonard Cohen

In mid-May, I fell off a ladder while doing some work in my house. One moment, I was in the hallway poking my head into the attic and the next moment I was crashing to the floor.

All I can remember now is watching the ladder shoot down the hallway as I hit the ground. It did so with such force, it appeared it would blast through the back of the house and land in the backyard. Instead, it hit the wall along its way, carving a dent into the drywall before stopping in its path and clattering to the floor.

The shock of the fall on impact froze me to the floor. I refused to budge, expecting my back, one or both legs, or one of my ankles would soon sear with pain.

Couldn’t someone my age expect to be royally destroyed by this kind of spill? Sentenced to the emergency room or a short hospital stay, followed by months of physical therapy?

Remarkably, agony never arrived, and I discovered I could stand up and capably walk around afterwards.

A few moments later, however, while looking at the gouge in the wall that the ladder made, I noticed my right hand was throbbing and sore. Looking down, I could see the ring finger had become swollen. The palm around that finger was also very tender and it stung when I pressed on it.

I still have no recall of hitting my hand during the fall. I have a vague memory of trying to grab at the wood beams above me in the instant I walked on air. But I may have invented that memory, too. The whole thing happened so fast.

A few days later, following a steady relay of ice, heat, and ice again, the injured area wouldn’t stop hurting, the swelling did not go down, and the finger had become very stiff. It wasn’t straight and stiff either, but appeared stuck in a curved formation, resembling a single, bent arthritic claw in the middle of my hand.

My doctor ordered an X-Ray. It wasn’t broken, so she sent me to Occupational Therapy.

Almost three months later, I’m still seeing an OT provider with some frequency, dealing with this lone ring finger. It feels silly that a single finger warrants the focus I’ve given it, and that the treatment to make it functional again requires so much time and attention. And yet, to recall the blurry incident, I remain surprised that nothing else was hurt, and that I’m not limping around in a big boot with velcro straps, or hopping room to room on crutches. In this way, finger splints and hand exercises seem a reasonable trade-off.

Still, as someone who has to type a lot in his work, this has presented challenges. And, as a person who has for a lot of his life entertained a compulsive writing habit, this has provided the material for a good, old-fashioned identity crisis. But at the risk of the word “crisis” unnecessarily burdening things, this whole situation has felt comic, too, bearing traces of an absurdist farce. That one finger has since mid-May impacted everything I do at this desk - where I’m now sitting - and affects so many daily tasks and ordinary activities has kept me on the lookout for some trickster goblin hiding in the wings. I imagine him rubbing his palms together and mischievously smirking nearby, wickedly amused by this recent turn of events.

*

Ever since pursuing medical attention to address the matter, every provider I’ve met with has asked if the injury occurred in my dominant hand.

Each time, I’ve explained that while I write left-handed, the matter of which hand is my dominant hand has throughout my life posed some confusion - a situation dating back to grade school. If, by dominant hand, one means to know which hand I write with, then, no, the injured hand is not my dominant hand. 1

Typing, however, requires I use both hands to compose text. Since the injury has revealed how dependent I am on a keyboard for writing sentences and building paragraphs, the question of whether it has impacted my dominant hand can feel beside the point. Somewhere along the way, I adapted my writing habit to two hands. By this measure, my one bum finger complicates a lot of my daily tasks and activities.

When and how did I so casually ease away from paper and pen (or pencil), and become dependent on keyboards and digital devices to corral and then relay the activities of my mind? When did writing for me became synonymous with typing, and less so with…writing? That is, making words with one hand and a pen or pencil, in that way that any of us ever learns (or once learned) to write in the first place?

Ever since the ladder disappeared from under me, I’ve dictated all my therapy notes, and many text messages. I’m also using more emojis in my text messages than I was previously using. (Emojis = less typing.) And GIFs. I’m an avid, unapologetic user of GIFs now. Be forewarned: Some days I may communicate in iMessage almost exclusively through GIFs.

*

In his book, Working, Robert Caro recalls a milestone moment in his development as a writer while an undergrad at Princeton.

One semester, Caro took a creative writing course led by an esteemed literary critic of the era, Robert Blackmur. Despite his admiration for his professor, Caro - characteristic of the typical college student - struggled to meet his deadlines and to give his work the attention it deserved.

“I was always [writing my stories] at the very last minute; I seem to recall more than one all-nighter to get my assignment in on time.” And because his professor would compliment his students’ efforts, Caro believed he was fooling him about the amount of time he spent preparing and crafting his stories, while also fooling himself about the quality of his own efforts.

During his final meeting with his instructor that semester, Caro reflects that Blackmur offered him “generous” feedback about his work, as he had at other times during the semester. Then, as their time together drew to a close, Blackmur surprised the hopeful writer, telling him, “But you’re never going to achieve what you want, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

If you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.

Caro felt exposed by Blackmur in that instant. Recalling his instructor’s words, Caro writes, “Professor Blackmur had seen right through me.”

Blackmur’s observation revealed a distinction between the hurried work Caro typed and passed off to cover his bases and meet deadlines, versus the careful, quality work the professor knew Caro stood capable of achieving.

“I determined to do something to slow myself down,” Caro writes, “to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.”

I started Caro’s book shortly before my injury, and his recall of Blackmur’s advice hit an already tender area and left its mark. Even before falling in my hallway, I was aware of a growing restlessness, an unsettling feeling about my orientation towards time in my day, and my scattered attention towards various creative projects. My crash landing on the floor, and its impact on my ability to rapidly type or record my racing, hurried thoughts only emphasized it and made avoiding it impossible.

*

Typing and “not-handwriting”2 may not seem a matter of great import or concern for many of us in the 2020s. These days, our thumbs do so much of the talking for us, after all - and on our telephones, no less.

Assessing occasions that I still without thinking resort to handwriting, I’ve discovered these typically amount to grocery lists I jot on a white board on my fridge, and to-do items I will scribble in a small, deeply discounted 2024 day planner I bought at Barnes & Noble in late ’24. I’ll also instinctively scribble measurements on scraps of paper (or sometimes in pencil on the wall) during house projects. Even then, however, I sometimes catch myself offloading these tasks to the Notes app on my phone, recording in that space the miscellany or minutia I need to remember.

Even if my “typing vs. handwriting” ratio does not amount to a five-alarm-fire problem3 - and is limited to my tendency to perseverate on my concerns - it reflects an uncomfortable awareness that this one swollen, curved, and stiff ring finger’s forced me to face:

Some crucial form of patience I once possessed and invested in the writing process has gone missing. It eludes me. In its place resides a teeming, disorganized reactivity - a hyper-sensitivity towards the thief of time. And maybe this disposition - and the recognition that it wasn’t always this way for me - is what alarms me more than anything.

*

Caro’s reflection on his conversation with Blackmur follows other, similar encounters compounding this awareness in recent months, even prior to my fall.

A few months ago, I learned Anne Lamott joined Substack. For years, I used Lamott’s classic, Bird by Bird, as a textbook in my creative writing workshops. On learning she established a presence on the platform, I wondered if she might utilize the space to share insights about the writing life.

The hunch paid off. In one of her earliest offerings on the site, Lamott provides guidance specific to writing:

“First, stop NOT writing,” she urges, “Get your butt in a chair and make a deal with yourself to stay there for awhile.”

Stop NOT writing. That was good. I needed that.

She continues:
“Find some actual paper. It is this flat, white stuff with lines on it.”

Her students nowadays, however, push back. “[They] always insist that they do everything better on their phones.”

Lamott doesn’t budge: “That’s very nice,” she tells them, “But when all else fails, follow instructions.”

It is at this point, she notes - in her droll style - that her student writers grow bitter.

“Now,” she writes, “I want them to find pencils, preferably, or pens, and to make a long scribbly list of their earliest memories, if they are working on a memoir. Then they are to proceed chronologically from there.”

It was at this point that I then grew bitter.

Lamott, in her characteristic candor, adds, “I mention nicely that not a single person in their family will be glad to hear they are writing a memoir.”

However, I didn’t register that line about family and memoir when I read it the first time. Lamott had lost me a moment earlier, with “pencils, preferably, or pens.”

Next, there’s Julia Cameron, the author of forever-popular The Artist’s Way [TAW]. It’s one of those biblical texts for anyone needing a big kick in the pants of their stalled, discouraged, or unacknowledged creative energies and impulses. Working artist or closet creative, the book intends to assist anyone stuck or hopeful in the process of unlocking and living into their potential in their chosen realm of the arts.

Whoever you are, when you embark on Cameron’s program, the author urges you to commit to waking up a little earlier every morning to draft three, full, freely-written and unrestrained “Morning Pages.” Cameron swears by the daily practice of these Morning Pages the way bodybuilders today tout the virtues of kettle bells and protein powder. And you wouldn’t be wrong to suspect Cameron believes the benefits of the Morning Pages will amount to the creative equivalent of a ripped physique.

On one hand, per Cameron in TAW, there are no rules about how you complete or attend to your Morning Pages - so long as you commit to the routine and complete those three pages of writing every day.

However, in a short work she published following TAW years later, The Miracle of Morning Pages, Cameron specifies the rules of what “no rules” exactly means for the individual engaged in the Morning Pages ritual. Per Cameron:

Pages must be done longhand.

The computer is fast - too fast for our purposes. Writing by computer gets you speed but not depth. Writing by computer is like driving a car at 85 mph. Everything is a blur…Longhand pages give us detail and the truth of how we feel emotionally.

Accuracy is what we are after, not velocity.
Longhand pages tell us precisely how we feel.

These feelings may be uncomfortable, but they are ours. We name them, claim them. No longer ignored or obscured, they can be faced squarely. Once faced, they can no longer sabotage us. We find ourselves acting rather than acting out.

As with Lamott and Caro, my response to Cameron’s text amounted to a wheezing, deflating balloon feeling inside my skull. Maybe some juvenile sulking and bratty kicks and groans occurred, too. I was not happy to receive such specific, uncompromising instructions. And, at this stage of life, recognizing I’m uneasy or alarmed by something is to acknowledge I’ve vacated my capacity to reason and am huddled up somewhere in my animal brain ready to pounce on the offending, threatening party.

I wanted to call foul on these authors. On Cameron, with her now-classic TAW in its 30th Anniversary printing; on Lamott with her adored novels, insightful spiritual works, and her timelessly relevant Bird by Bird. And not least of all, I wanted to disregard Robert Caro. Caro, who first wrote The Power Broker, his gigantic Pulitzer-winning tome, by hand. And even multiple drafts of it. And then, too, all five volumes of his study of Lyndon Johnson. All of them, by hand.4

Pens, pencils, notebooks, paper, longhand drafts, and what all.

For Pete’s sake.
What did they know?

*

Weeks later, indicative of my injury and its forced revision of any/all writing efforts, I continue to wrestle with this auto-impulse to “think with my fingers.”

At heart, it’s revealed an undercurrent of anxiety manifesting as impatience with the time and level of attention that a wholehearted and intentional endeavor requires. In 2026, when everyone seems exceptionally fueled on caffeine and 5G speed internet, in the era of infinite doomscrolling, at a time when we devour novels and podcasts at 2x speed, nothing can feel more backwards or time consuming than planting one’s butt in a chair, taking a deep breath, and writing by hand words on a page, a card, or even - as I’ve discovered - a postcard.

At late midlife, this bears evidence to a more sobering and at times unsettling feeling: an ever-widening vulnerability to the hands of time, and the recognition that time feels short, or shorter - in my life, at my stage of life, and in an era where the technologies and skills I learned to employ can feel increasingly inadequate and antiquated.

In that way, I feel that my blind adaptation to the keyboard as my “technology” of choice has not come without costs.5 Costs I might not recognize if not for this one minor injury.

These costs have manifested, I see now, with a variety of symptoms: Primarily, my overall impatience with handwriting. The pace at which a keyboard allows me to race and move can amount to a nearly narcotic high at times. This, in part, may explain my unblinking impulse to open a laptop, pad, or phone to type an idea - a sentence, song lyrics, or an idea for a story to pursue.

There’s also the matter of my aching wrists, a symptom I needed to address with my doctor a few years ago, and that he suspected were in part due to phone use and time spent on the computer.

More recently noticeable, too, has become the restless leg I discover bouncing up and down when I’m seated at a table thinking with my hands, as it was a moment ago while I wrote this paragraph. This leg belongs to me, but this restless bouncing habit did not always come with the package.

(What a curious polarity, too: dealing with a stiff, stuck ring finger on this writing surface, and then a bouncing, restless leg with a mind of its own underneath the table.)

Every time I catch myself bouncing that leg up and down, I recall making fun of a friend in high school decades ago, whenever I observed him bouncing his leg across from me during class. That I pointed it out and then joked about that wild piston firing away under Drew’s desk was back then a way of saying I didn’t understand what was going on and that I had no context for what I observed.

I’m wondering if that’s because, back then, I had a way of focusing. It’s not that I didn’t experience restlessness, or struggle to contain my energies in adolescence. School was a nonstop struggle for me in that capacity.

However, I had a means of both appearing present and becoming entirely consumed in something back then. While I might not have understood or cared about what our teacher was talking about in different subjects, once class began, I could open a notebook and start writing. In some cases, this might mean I entirely ignored what the teacher was asking us to observe or learn, since vanishing into my imagination and returning to a story in process held more sway.6

My ability to focus on whatever captured my attention in my notebook often guaranteed I would not rock the boat (or, perhaps, my leg) and draw unwanted attention to myself in class. In most cases I at least looked busy and flew under the radar. This practice, of course, did not in any way do service to my grades in the classes I found boring or where the material instantly lost me, such as my math and science classes.

Meanwhile, when I opened my notebook, I could fill it with stories to share with Eric, Andy, Tara, or Bob later. These had a structure, a compelling narrative - a feature that many school classes and work appeared on their surface to lack. This is not to suggest for a moment I wrote good stories or anything memorable in those years or worth revisiting today. These were, by my recall, mostly or at best loose imitations of my favorite comic books, sitcoms, or movies.

Still, when I think back to those efforts, I see myself pouring my whole heart and focus into those notebooks. To the endless frustrations of select high school teachers grading my school work, I see teenager Jonathan writing, by hand, filling the college-ruled pages, moving left-to-right across the blank space on the paper, line by line. The bell ending class always came mid-sentence or -scene, and always too soon. In many cases, the ideas were flowing so freely and without concern or worry about where they would take me, and my teacher sat 1000 miles or worlds away from where my writing had carried me.

This was the late 1980s, and I was careening towards whatever follows the relentless tedium of high school. I understood one thing more than many other thing right then. I understood it then as much as Jonathan in 2026 cannot begin to grasp it today.

I knew in my bones, and without hesitation or question, what Julia Cameron means when she assures us that “[moving] our hand across the page, we find ourselves crafting a new life.”

6

Talk about feeling exposed: Reading Dr. Gabor Mate’s Scattered Minds a couple years ago felt like the author/therapist had written a book-length case study on my challenges in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and in many of my intimate relationships.

If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow
- Bob Dylan

Odysseus, experienced in loss,
took careful note.
- The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson1

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