Technology changes us as much as we change technology. It trains us to behave in certain ways, to modify how we speak or move to better accommodate its utility. In some cases, technology can transform the very things that define us. Perhaps the most literal example is our handwritten signature, a core talisman of identity. Developed in response to the ancient technology of paper and ink, it’s lately been confronted with the primacy of keyboards and screens.

Think about how you most often sign your name, if you do at all: It’s not with a pen. Over the past decade, businesses have updated their points of sale with touch pads and styluses. Signing contracts increasingly happens electronically, where you either “draw” your signature with a mouse or just type in your name. More recently, mice and styluses have disappeared in favor of fingers. Touchscreen computers and Square machines have turned signatures into a thing you must jab and press into existence—a thing that never looks quite right.

Emily Dreyfuss covers the intersection of tech and culture for WIRED.

Twitter is full of people crowing that their digital signatures look wrong. Some embrace the anarchy of it, approaching the Square payment screen like a blank canvas to create modern art. Others just dash off a squiggle. For a long time I took a purist’s approach, trying my best to stay true to my real signature, deleting and trying again when it came out weird, apologizing to people in line behind me. All of the people I’ve talked to about this, from friends to cashiers to fellow shoppers, say their on-screen signature bears little resemblance to their “real one” now. Some admit that the muscle memory to handwrite their names—that last vestige of cursive—is atrophying, leaving them with an inconsistent John Hancock. Always, a note of anxiety creeping in these confessions.

“Your signature is like a public image,” says Sheila Lowe, a writer and handwriting expert who works as a forensic document analyst for court cases. “A signature shows what the person wants the world to know about them.” Lowe is also president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation, a group of graphologists who believe handwriting can reveal personality traits. Whether or not you believe in graphology, which has been called a pseudoscience, there’s no doubt signatures matter—legally, emotionally, even neurologically. Now people are wondering if it matters that their signatures are changing.

Last year, Lowe worked for Adobe at the company’s big conventions, luring people to the Adobe Sign software booths with a free handwriting analysis. “We were having people sign on the iPad and on paper. To a person, they'd complain about the way their handwriting looked on the iPad,” Lowe says. “Our on-screen signature just doesn't represent us in the same way.”

The Origins of an Identity (Crisis)

Before I had a signature of my own, I had my dad’s. He’s a well-known actor, and when I was a little kid in the ’80s people mailed photos of him to our house hoping he’d sign them and send them back. He always did, but there were so many that, well, other people helped out. My mom knew how to do his signature exactly. So did his assistant, and starting around 7 years old, so did I. As my brothers got older, they did some too. We’d all sit around the kitchen table together with stacks of headshots and sign Dad’s name with sharpies. (I’m sorry if you received a forgery. For what it’s worth, we put a lot of love into it and none of us can tell the difference.)

So when I was 8 years old and beginning to dream of what I wanted to be when I grew up—a writer, movie star, and also a news broadcaster, and to drive a large red truck—I knew the first thing I needed was a signature of my own. I sat at the end of my bed with a notebook and pencil and modeled one based on Dad’s. The light out my window dimmed as I tried different iterations, eventually landing on something that felt like me: a big loopy E followed by large scribbles cascading into smaller scribbles, exploding into a D that sweeps around, hits the E, strikes through the center of itself to cross a previously planted F, and ends in a dashed line. I practiced and practiced until I had to turn on the light by the bed to practice more. As I wrote it, I imagined what it would feel like to be a success in my own right one day (teaching my own daughter how to copy it for my fans).

"George W. Bush's signature is just like his father's. It is that need to live up to that ideal,” she says, casually diagnosing one of the most fundamental aspects of my psyche.

I grew up, and for a quarter century the loops and lines of my signed name remained mostly fixed. Whether I was signing a love letter, a parking ticket, or the lease on my first apartment—fwiw, it was never an autograph—there was my crafted self, emblazoned on the dotted line.