I recently watched Meghan Markle’s new show, With Love, Meghan, and beyond the general splendor of seeing Meghan in her element crafting, cooking and gardening amongst the magnificent backdrop of Montecito mountains, one thing really struck me. What lovely and beautiful handwriting Meghan has.

And it inspired me…to take a journey into upgrading my own handwriting to be more beautiful. More elegant. More lovely, too.

So, I’ve been diligently (maybe not diligently… carefully is probably a better word here), attempting to overhaul my own cursive handwriting.

And boy, oh, boy is it attention-focused.

Every time I handwrite a letter, a card, address an envelope it requires 10-20 minutes of thoughtful attention to the letters being formed. Something that used to take seconds and little thought now takes minutes and a lot of thought.

It really makes you really ponder back to when you were first learning to write back in kindergarten. The teacher using the overhead projector, markers, and clear sheets of transparency film (feel free to look this up people below the age of 22) to show us how to carefully form the uppercase and lowercase for each of the 26 letters. Then, we would get the worksheet to trace the letters ourselves before then trying it out all on our own. Eeeekkk the excitement of adding another letter to your repertoire!

Flash forward a couple years to second grade, and we do it all over again with the cursive alphabet.

Then, for the next seven years or so, our handwriting is constantly evolving as we find “our handwiritng”. Later elementary school sees us feeling more confident in our writing of letters and doing it without much thought. Middle school sees the little “i” dotted with a heart and our handwriting looking a little more polished than it did when we were five years old.

Then- around the middle of high school- it seems to stop. We’ve deemed ourselves to have the handwriting we have. We stop really changing it. It’s ours forever.

Why though? Why do we decide we can’t keep evolving our handwriting? Why do we feel that despite the fact that we will forever keep changing and evolving as human beings… our handwriting gets to stay stuck in the past.

There are certain parts of my “old” handwriting that I love and that I don’t. So, I’m going to change them, and I’ll keep what makes me happy.

There isn’t a deadline or a cut-off to changing our handwriting… or anything else really in life (are you getting the feeling this a bit of a metaphor?). It will take some attention at the start of it-see above about taking 15 minutes to address an envelope right now-but sooner or later it will become second nature. It will become the next evolution of “who you are.”

Here’s your permission… you are allowed to keep changing yourself as an adult.

So, whether it be your handwriting, your wardrobe look, a hobby, a career, or your whole life…

It’s never too late.