Am I Clumsy?

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Holy crap, it’s October! 🍂🍁 I do not know we ended up here, or how those of us in living in the dumpster fire that is the United States have even made it through this year. Sorry, I mean “the hottest country around” 😒. I am so ready for fall and winter though, let me tell you.

I was having a conversation with a disabled friend recently, and we were talking about this idea of being “clumsy.” Several of us with the same disability described ourselves as “clumsy” growing up, but as we’ve gotten older, we started to realize that we aren’t in fact clumsy at all, we’re just disabled.

Usually, when someone drops things a lot or falls/trips a lot, we would describe them as clumsy. If you’re non-disabled, maybe that’s true. But when you live with a disability that gives you extreme weakness throughout your whole body—including your hands—those are really just symptoms of said disability.

For the most part, I knew that was true of my falling. My propensity for falling has absolutely nothing to do with being clumsy. When I do trip over something, it’s often because my legs are weak so I’m dragging my feet. Or my foot gets stuck because I’m weak, or my leg(s) give out. I’m not just haphazardly tripping over things left-and-right.

The realization that dropping things didn’t make me clumsy came in the last couple of years though. In my hellish nightmare of an attempt to get occupational therapy for people with disabilities, I ended up meeting a nice lady who was essentially a hand physical therapist. For some asinine reason, my medical provider defines occupational therapy as therapy for your hands/arms and that’s it. That being said, though it wasn’t the appointment I needed, I underwent some tests to see how my hand and finger strength was. Turns out, not very good! In all my years of living with a disability, it just never occurred to me that even my hands were weak. Not in this kind of context anyway. I knew it was hard/impossible for me to open jars or lids sometimes, but it never dawned on me that my frequent dropping of things was a part of that too.

It’s actually incredibly freeing when you can step out of a label and realize there’s actually a reason why certain things are happening to you. Dropping things and falling aren’t personality traits for me, they’re a result of my muscular dystrophy. That somehow gave me permission to stop beating myself up about it, because there’s nothing I can do about it. I do have some putty the hand therapist gave me though that actually helps quite a bit…when I remember to use it. That doesn’t mean I still don’t get frustrated when I drop something and then have to decide if I’m going to strain my back to pick it up, or go out of my way to get one of my many grabbers to get it. If I pick it up and drop it again, then I just start cursing God (a God I don’t believe in by the way, but that’s a story for another time). But knowing that it’s just something I was born with gives it a lot less power.

When I think back on growing up, there were so many labels applied to so many of us that were either over or under simplifications. I was told I was a “worry wart” by a lot of people—all the way into my 20s. Turns out, it’s not “worry”, it’s anxiety with some OCD sprinkled in. Again, not something I have a whole lot of control over, just like with my falling and dropping of all the things.

Is there anything you’ve labeled yourself as over the years that you realized is just part of you or not something you have any kind of control over?

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