My Signature: A Moviestar Moment

When I was promoted to what was to become my final role before retirement I had a momentary realisation that would make a small, but legally important, change in my life from that point on. I needed to change my signature. 

 

The role I was taking on, area manager for the local education and training board, would require me to sign multiple documents across a range of purposes on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. The signature I had relied upon for the whole of my adult life up to that point was extremely legible and used a print based layout – letter by letter. It required me to lift the pen a number of times and more importantly was rarely used. I needed a signature that would be more difficult to copy and quick and easy to use multiple times in succession.

 

That’s how I found myself doing what a lot of teenagers dreaming about fame have done across the whole world – practising a new signature.

 

I discovered if I only used the first letter of my first name and smoothed out repeated letters in my surname, the process began to flow better. It helped when I began to think of the final product as an easily repeatable but unique graphic, rather than a collection of readable letters. I had a new signature.

 

The ‘work’ paid off when on my first day in my new role, I was handed a small stack of standard employment contracts to sign while my assistant stood over me waiting for them to ‘catch the post’. It was like an author at a book signing or an actor at a convention – my moviestar moment.

 

In time I forgot about the old signature – with a few exceptions where I had to verify the new version with banks, driving license authorities and passport offices – and my new ‘scrawl’ as I affectionately called it became part of my identity. That was the interesting part though. Apart from the legal significance placed on your signature it eventually becomes another part of who you are – your ‘self’.

 

I found this interesting because the notion of ‘self’ was always something that interested me, largely because I was never really sure who I really was and seemed to be permanently looking for ways to modify that ‘self’ in some way. The Buddha said an authentic self didn’t exist because we were constantly changing and philosophers like Hume tended to agree with him. Kant talked about an inner and outer ‘self’ (something I could definitely relate to). So this practical change led me to looking at something much more fundamental to how I saw the world and my search for ‘me’. But that’s a story for another day.

 

Have you ever made a small but significant practical change that went on to have a broader impact on who you are or want to be?

 

Photo by Signature Pro on Unsplash

*Originally published on autumnleaves.ie