WARNING: If you’ve got pain in your body, listen to it. If you’re a big Gamer, please take breaks and play responsibly. Video games are wonderful but they aren’t worth destroying your mind and body over playing them, or making them. You’ll thank me later.

I recently started using an ELECOM HUGE trackball mouse. Trackball mice are an alternative to traditional mice. Instead of moving the mouse around, you rotate a ball that’s fixed in place (the trackball) using your fingers which then moves the mouse cursor on the screen.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small piece of tech. But, for someone like me with chronic pain in my hands and wrists who spends more than eight hours a day on the computer, it’s a big deal. Every little change to the way I interact with the computer can have a gigantic impact on me and my physical well-being.

How did we get here?

A few years ago, I woke up to a searing pain in both of my wrists. I had just started a new job a few months before and, here I was, completely broken and laying in my bed living a nightmare.

A few months before, I was really unhappy and not fully aware of it. I was working forty hours a week and I was doing some unpaid overtime on top of that. I was spending twelve hours a week travelling to and from work. I was living at home with my parents because my generation has been fucked harder than any previous generation and all this bullshit was getting to me.

As an escape, I was spending more and more of my free time playing video games. This happened naturally to me because I had been an obsessive compulsive player of video games for most of my life.

Life isn’t fair but good video games are. Life doesn’t always reward you for your hard work but good video games do. The world we live in is falling apart, we’ve siphoned everything we can from it and our environment is suffering the consequences, but every new video game provides us with a fresh slate. Video games allow us to live in worlds where we can ignore the problems in our own.

That’s what I was trying to do. I spent a couple weeks obsessively playing Path of Exile and Warframe, to try and ignore my descent into severe unhappiness. If you’ve played either of these games you know that all you do is

click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

to move closer and closer to the carrot on the stick that keeps getting pulled away from you.

This clicking pushed my body over the edge of no return which led to me laying in bed with wrists on fire burning a hole inside of me. It didn’t happen overnight, it took years of gaming, studying and overworking on the computer. It was gradual, so gradual that it was easy for me to ignore my body breaking down as it was happening. Eventually, the pain became impossible to ignore.

I’m much better now. After years of physiotherapy, the chronic pain became manageable. It never left though, my chronic pain is a constant reminder of my stupidity and the harshness of the world we live in. Being at the lowest point of my life sucked big time. But it was also an opportunity to build myself back up again bigger and better than before. I tried to ignore my problems and the world around me and I royally fucked myself in the process. Looking back, I noticed that this has been a recurring theme in my life.

Over and over again, ignoring problems until it’s too late to fix them.

Never again.

If I want something then I work for it. If I’m not making progress then I try something else until I succeed. If I’m unhappy then I acknowledge it, and I actively try to find a solution at the source. The pursuit of happiness is never ending but I have to find satisfaction in the present while working towards a better future.

I’ve been feeling unhappy with the mouse I’ve been using for a while now. I met some people who swear by their trackballs, so I shopped around and eventually decided to take the plunge on the ELECOM HUGE.

The problem with ergonomic computer gear is that everyone’s different. You have to try each piece of equipment and do so for a long time to see if it’s a good fit or not. I’ve got a few boxes full of failed ergonomic gear, including a trackball mouse, to prove it.

I’ve used the HUGE mouse for about two weeks now, I haven’t thought about or felt my chronic pain for most of that time. It’s been wonderful. The HUGE fits my big hand perfectly. All the buttons and the trackball itself are perfectly positioned for my fingers to reach them and press them comfortably.

Really, it’s a small thing, it’s just a computer mouse but it’s a HUGE thing for me.

Follow me with fraidycat, or an RSS reader, to be notified whenever I write something.