The lined paper exercise

Fifth graders can still fall in the pure and innocent category when comparing them to older adolescents and adults.
A trained psychologist once substituted for my fifth grade class – I believe she was the school psychologist. It was one of those emergency situations where my regular teacher had to leave in the middle of the day to take care of some family matter.
The substitute, a woman in her late 30s possibly early 40s, frizzy blonde hair in a “Working Girl” outfit, always seemed frazzled, discombobulated. I remember thinking she was going through a divorce. It was just a hunch.
On the one occasion I remember her subbing, she asked all the students in our class to take out a piece of paper. We all pulled out lined paper and were ready to take directions. The directions were simple. “Keeping your eyes on your own paper, write your full name wherever you’d like.”
I couldn’t help but glance over to my neighbor’s paper and watch him write his name in huge letters across the middle of the paper. It looked like everyone, at least the four who I sat closest to, wrote their names similarly, some not as big. I felt like I needed to do the same, but my hand wouldn’t allow me. My default inclination brought my hand to the lower right corner of the paper where I wrote in very fine printing and very tiny lettering my first and last name. At the end of the exercise, we evaluated our own papers. The exercise, as the substitute explained, revealed the core of our personalities. Those who were inclined to write in the middle of the paper and in big letters were naturally confident people who liked and preferred attention. Those who wrote small and in corners, basically, weren’t. Any minute amount of confidence I had left in me dissolved. And ever since then, I still write my name on the bottom right corner.

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