After suffering a stroke at age 25, Eilish Briscoe created a font to illustrate the process of relearning to write

Over time, however, with the help of rehabilitation therapists, the support of her family, and personal perseverance and practice, Eilish began to make improvements, and her motor skills and speech began to return, albeit slowly. One practice that Eilish consistently devoted herself to, along with her mother, was handwriting. Her mother would write a letter and Eilish would try to copy it over and over. It was this process, and the pages of practice it left behind, that would later spark the idea for Eilish’s font.

Because Eilish suffered a stroke during the first pandemic lockdown, and because of her feelings of “embarrassment,” she saw very few people during the experience, aside from her family and a handful of friends. “But when we came out of the pandemic, it was weirdly like it never happened,” Eilish says, “and I felt like my experience was so misunderstood.” For Eilish, creating the font felt like a tangible way to communicate what she’d been through to friends and family. Additionally, the process helped Eilish regain her digital skills, a goal she’d set to help her transition back into work.

The font is made up of letters Eilish picked out from her handwriting practice, within a few days of each other, reflecting an early stage in Eilish’s recovery. You’ll notice that the font doesn’t feature any capitalization or punctuation—as they were unnecessary to her at this stage in her recovery. Eilish named the font Maybe for a couple of reasons. During her recovery, with her speech also severely affected, Eilish found herself returning to the word. “I had lost all autonomy and wasn’t able to accept or reject anything: everything was ultimately a decision made by my caregivers,” she says. “The word ‘maybe’ takes me back to this feeling of hopelessness and uncertainty.” Although Eilish now acknowledges, in retrospect, that “‘maybe’ is a word that is also loaded with possibility, and therefore hope.”