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Anon · 5mo

can u talk about your repetitive strain injury you got a few years ago, how long it took to recover (if it is completely gone now), if anything in particular helped other than ~time~, etc. im feeling that familiar ache in my wrist and its right when im hyperfocused on drawing which as you can probably imagine is Not Fun

OH MY GOD yes, I'm sorry I was so late to reply to this one!

Yes, a few years back I decided to go ham into one of the comic ideas I had. It was quite developed at the time and felt that I could just hop into it. I was drawing thumbs/boards for the comic like an absolute maniac, but the real multiplier of that repetitive strain, one I think artists don't take as seriously, is that I was NOT TYPING PROPERLY!! I wasn't touch typing (you know like ASDF JKL;?) I was like... improperly typing. That combined with the crazy amount of drawing I was doing without warmup-wrist stretches and regular breaks caused me to get stinging, shooting pains in both wrists like if I dared to start hopping back into what I was doing!!

I feel like it took me about a year to get back to my new normal. My new normal feels completely normal, like factory reset, as if nothing ever happened, EXCEPT!! Now: my wrists will signal to me if I'm bothering them. Which only happens if I don't stretch or take regular breaks. Do wrist stretches for artists and take breaks every 30min or every hour. They don't even have to be that long. Get up, get a snack, go to the bathroom, take a shower, whatever, that kind of thing. It helps immensely. Do not Leeroy Jenkins your art and do not "look guys, I finished this piece/comic page in one sitting!!" that stuff. And do not, type, improperly. Type the boring standardized way. It's made to minimize the amount of finger/wrist movements you have to make, with the bonus of not needing to look at your keyboard when you do.

Little remedies! Ice packs. Love me a good ice pack when my wrist(s) start beeping at me. If you've had a bad wrist day, you can also chill/sleep in a wrist brace (or two) but don't draw in them. They're made for inaction, not to hold you still IN action.

As a neurodivergent person I'm telling you, HYPERFOCUS... HYPERFOCUS CAN BE THE ENEMY sometimes, like, you have to set annoying-ass timers to tell you to bugger off because our poor little wrist tendons cannot keep up with our brains, it's true.

I hope this was helpful/insightful in some way!! Feel back to send a follow-up question if you need more specific answers about something!

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