Immobile as an artist’s model, hunched over a keyboard with my eyes rooted to a screen, I built up injuries within myself, without my knowledge or awareness.
Now my hands cramp up when I turn a screwdriver. Overnight, numbness creeps, mirroring the shape of fingers curled around a mouse, one hand at a time.
Datamancer’s Steampunk Laptop. Mine is not like this, sadly.
Slouched, slumped, poised ever like a rat over a lump of cheese.
A year of lockdown yoga showed me where those injuries had gathered.
First, my shoulders thawed, unfolding like wings as I stretched into Warrior II.
Lower back, until now hinged at the waist, became a supple S-shape (not without passing through L, and Z, and some of the more rigid Cyrillic characters first).
Each session brought a new loose muscle. Snap, crackle, pop, like some long-forgotten breakfast cereal. Ping! Sometimes when I least expected it.
Ooo…
I have to limit my time at the keyboard now, or pay the price. So much poor posture gathered over the last 25 years in a Desk Job has damaged me, wear and tear, my spine a staircase under centuries of monkish sandals.
Tendons, too: rigid. The form of a normal human body crunched by time.
Hobbies which are handicrafts must be limited now, and any future work must take into account the effects on my hands and wrists. I can’t spend all day moving books from one bookcase to another unless I am prepared to wake in the night with hands nettle-raw and foreign. I can’t spend the day making bread, or peeling vegetables, or chopping logs, without the spectre of numbness fringing the morning after.
Lockdown didn’t help. Sure, I did yoga more than I had before, which helped the aforementioned loosening. But I forgot how to walk.
Ten months of straying less than 50m from my desk meant that hip joints and ITBs gummed up. Strolling to the Post Office to buy stamps for festive cards in December, it felt like unlocking a suitcase left on top of the wardrobe for years.
Now some of this is peril for the writer. Some of those injuries wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t been a desk jockey, my days numbered in spreadsheets and emails, but I know that over time whatever your profession, injury will happen.
We used to joke in health & safety briefings about not standing on a swivel chair to fix some tinsel thing to the ceiling, or carry fifteen boxes down the stairs without looking. We shrugged, and ticked the form, when asked to self-assess our “display screen equipment” set-up, knowing there was little we could change when every day meant a different desk.
But those injuries build up over time, not overnight.
One colleague told how her husband, a carpenter, had to change his line of work when his wrist tendons snapped. Forty years of sawing, chiselling, hammering and – ping! – his ability to work, gone.
This doesn’t just affect your ability to type, or use a hammer. Your hands control the steering in a car, or on a bicycle. Sit behind the wheel for an hour’s commute when your wrists are buzzing like wasps and your fingers are out of focus? See David Wake’s difficulties described in A Writer Not Writing.
We tend to think that if we don’t work in a factory or a foundry, we’re immune to workplace injury. Not so.
Mediaeval or Victorian levels of negligence over time lead to disability. Not at paraplegic levels, but when you can’t hold chopsticks because your knuckle joints lock against each other, can’t twist around to bathe properly because your spine is stiff, or have no strength to fetch a can of soup from a high shelf…
So many of us hunch over tiny keyboards now. There’s only so much ergonomics can do to remedy this, especially when function and economy take precedence within design.
As my mother – a former typist – was keen to point out, a manual typewriter required much harder force to shift the keys; and every page was a break from typing. Roll the platen, fit the paper to the guides, flap a hand at the carriage return lever.
Now we type a page and then another, another, on and on until the writing’s done, without a break, a pause, a change in posture.
I know I’ve spent an hour at least without moving more than my fingers and eyes when deep in spreadsheet territory.
Sometimes, in a noisy office, losing yourself in work is the best way to cope. Other times, it’s just too easy to be drawn into endless reading – emails, articles, weblinks – or doomscrolling.
On looking up – resurfacing – hours have passed. Neck stiff, eyes dry and sore.
We are so often encouraged to develop bad habits by the absence of better habits.
Take a gift of advice from one whose hands are but slowly unfurling: don’t just tick the form to say you’ll comply with the guidance, or nod and scroll past – get up from the desk and leave the keyboard behind for five minutes.
Frederik Pohl was still writing when he was 93. I’ll wager he didn’t do so with RSI.
This week’s Happy Links (unthemed, this week):
Inside – A Guide – to celebrate the publication of Josie George’s remarkable memoir, A Still Life, here’s a link to an article written at the start of Lockdown 1, in 2020. How to cope with being indoors all the time, by someone who has little option.
Ursula Vernon: author, illustrator, gardener. I found Digger first, but there’s also A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking…
Music: Gaelic Psalm-singing, eerie and earthy (article with links and video). There’s a strange softness about the Gaelic language: sea-silence, peatsmoke and a warm breeze out of the West.
