The Problem with Word

I opened up Microsoft Word to write something entirely different, but the second I saw the screen pop up this rant burst forth.

I hate Microsoft Word. The greyish, boxy setting and the perfectly ordered options that make life too easy and the red and green squiggles that fix everything the second you mess up, it’s all so incorrect. I don’t want to be corrected the very instant I misspell a word; I want all of my mistakes and scratches and gorgeously messy handwriting to show the journey my mind took. I am forgetting how to spell, how to form letters with my own hand, not just the tips of my fingers. I am limited by the grammar rules programmed into this drab box and if I try to improvise and make something new and exciting the green squiggles show up and will not understand my genius. Today we have forgotten that a pen’s ink isn’t perfect, that all A’s are not the same three lines, that sometimes you write so fast that your hand slips or skips a letter, and other times so slow that the ink bleeds through the other side, rendering a new, organic image for you to find when you turn the page. We’ve forgotten how to capitalize, how to use semi-colons, how to imagine ridiculous words without looking through the built in thesaurus. We have come to expect the easy perfection of typing into a machine, where our glorious, infinitely useful hands have become just tools to tap on some keys to make a word. Is it still writing if it’s typed? Is it still a product of our mind and soul if our body didn’t truly feel the words being written? How can anyone know the sweet pain of writer’s cramp, when you’re so desperate to get down what is boiling out of your head but your hand is screaming enough! that it can’t take any more! but your heart is so full of pain or love or excitement that you power through that cramp and at the end, when you remember to breathe and your heart slows down and the paper in front of you is filled with horribly written beauty, and you stretch out your hand and know that you love that pain, because it is cruel and lovely proof that you are alive, that you can still release what’s inside, that you still have the ability to make your mark on this earth even if it’s only in ink.