The Writer’s Bump
Completely by chance, I found this article that dates back to May about the writer’s bump being headed for extinction, and I can indeed relate to this, since I had already noticed, quite some time ago, that mine had gotten smaller than before. Oh, it’s still here… just more discrete, less protuberant. Nowadays, when I work on my writing, I do it directly on the computer, so that I don’t need to “waste time” doing it on paper first, then copying everything in my word processor.
In a way, it’s a little sad. While I didn’t like it when I was still in my teens—I thought it made my finger look weird—I now somehow regret it. It was indeed some “badge of honor”, the proof that I was living with a pen in hand almost from the moment I got up in the morning to the moment I went to bed. I’d write everywhere, whenever I had five minutes ahead and no book under the hand to pass the time. Or I’d draw, depending on my mood. It’s a wonder that I don’t bear some freaky tatoo resulting from all this ink I got on my middle finger due to cheap leaky pens and mixing so many ink colors.
I still use pens here and there, of course, if only to write down an idea, but it’s nowhere near the amount of time I used to write manually “in times of old” (I know when I stopped: in 2002, when I switched from college studies to graphic-design ones, and would use a computer all the time). Same goes for drawing: vector works don’t demand me to prepare sketches for hours in a row. As a nasty side-effect, too, my handwriting has gotten awful; I used to tease my boyfriend about his, but really, mine hasn’t improved at all, on the contrary, since I’m not “practicing” as much as before.
Ah, well. This is one of the sad things about the wonders of the computer: our old writing scars are slowly disappearing!