Psychology Today professes that you can find your hidden self through contemplative writing. Sounds fine and dandy, except I haven’t the foggiest idea how contemplative writing differs from the blather that sprouts out of my fingertips onto a blank page on my PC.

 Supposedly, it combines meditation and writing, opening a window into one’s mind, whether neurotic and speedy, slow and sluggish, or mindful and meandering. Interesting.

Interesting that my writing style — and perhaps thought process — mimics my grandmother’s. After coming to America from Ukraine, she tirelessly wrote. Attending classes to learn English and then writing lengthy papers on every subject. She authored short stories and scripts, hoping to become a published writer. She wrote letters to family members, city officials, politicians, and companies from which she purchased products, shared her observations, tart opinions, and sage advice, composed silly poems and stories for grandchildren, and read her reflective and increasingly spiritual invocations to fellow congregants.

She scribbled on slips of paper, the backs of flyers and junk mail, and in the margins of articles she’d clipped. In her workroom were stacks of paper, typed, handwritten, paperclipped, haphazardly stuck in binders, sprawled across the bed… and in various places around the house, including the kitchen, chair where she sat to watch TV and stuck behind keepsakes on the fireplace mantel.

Every thought on every subject found its way onto a piece of paper.

Contemplations on current affairs. Critiques on human follies. Journals on everyday occurrences and family trips. Doubts about her marriage and child-rearing. Ponderings on philosophical themes. Wonderment in mother nature’s miracles. Tears of disappointment.

Most of the work was brilliant. Astonishing for a woman whose education stopped in the eighth grade.