I Wrote Too Much and Injured My Arm, But I’m Not Giving Up

Are health and ambition always at odds with each other?

Photo courtesy of Ksuksann on DepositPhotos. The author has the standard license to use the photo for commercial purposes.

So many writers feel the pressure to publish faster.

We need a bigger backlog of articles to grow our audience. We have to put more work out there to amass feedback and improve.

But what do we do if we sustain injuries in our mad dash towards our goals? Perhaps we should slow down and lower our expectations. We can’t just abandon our health, right?

Like many other writers here, I pushed myself to write more, hone my skills, and increase my readership. I used to publish once a week. This rose to about 1.5 times a week. Now it’s 2–3 times a week. I also moonlight as an erotica writer on another account.

But it seemed like I was too slow. I often compare myself to friends who publish daily or almost daily. So I felt like I wasn’t measuring up and that I must be too disorganized and inefficient.

So I pushed even harder.

I like to draft by hand, and I was so stubborn that even when my arm was in pain, I kept writing.

I was punished when my arm got injured.

This is not the first time this has happened. Last December, I did so much journaling by hand, that I…