My arm hurts too much…

To be completely honest it scares me how much my arm hurts. It also disappoints me. Two years ago I never thought I would say I would be experiencing pain like this. I just got out of class. I just got home. My arm hurts.

I take notes in all of my classes. In my brain and behavior I print out the slides and circle the important stuff. In statistics, I just fill the answers in on the practice problems. In research methods, I scribble down what’s on the slide and pause while everyone else finishes copyng. The slide changes, so I repeat. Race and ethnicity, I have a list of important terms - key terms they are called. When my teacher mentions one, I jot down a sentence or two about it and wait for the next word.

So my arm hurts. It doesn’t hurt every day, just today. Today was different. I didn’t take notes in race and ethnicity today like I usually do. Today, I wrote an essay. Let me repeat. I wrote an essay. I did not type - I wrote. My essay was 2 and a half pages long(so more like 5). 

My arm hurts today. Why? Because I wrote an essay.

This scares me. Two years ago, I never thought it would hurt me to write an essay. Two years ago, I was sitting in my AP literature class spilling ink everywhere about short stories and long stories like the Russian crazy guy one. Today, I write two maybe three essays a semester - and it hurts.

The doctor might ask me to describe how it hurts… Where my hand was resting on the desk, it feels as hard as a rock, and there is pain moving from where my hand sat on the desk across every single one of my bony knuckles. Then extending up my hand to my wrist I can feel every single bone tense as I move my hand. My wrist feels tense, like someone is squeezing it - like you do when you check to see if you can fit your fingers around your wrist and it barely wraps around so you squeeze tighter and then “ahh” your fingertips meet. Moving away from my wrist, the big bone of the two long ones in your forearm - that one hurts. The pain stops in my elbow. 

I’m scared. Writing shouldn’t hurt this much. I have become so dependent on my laptop and my keyboard that the basic skill, technique, and gift of using a pen is a task. Not just in the sense that I just had to complete an assignment, but my body had to exercise, rather intensively, to successfully complete my paper.

My arm hurts.