I Am A Klutz Who Needs To Use The Railing, So Please Wash Your Entire Hand
“Your skin is made of paper and your bones are made of glass,” — my friend Bridget, after taking me to the ER again.
Some of my earliest memories center on my tendency to drop things, break things, and trip. It took me years to understand my spatial relationship with the world. I have never been able to navigate easily. I fall off my bike, I trip up stairs, I go from running to flat on my face.
This has been diagnosed by medical professionals with a variety of explanations, mostly centering on anatomical structures that cause me to have an unsteady gait. My malformed skeletal system doesn’t explain my lack of depth perception or spatial awareness, so even when I make adjustments for my walk, drag, trip ambulation, I’ve found myself splat in many locations. I have broken a multitude of bones, spilt the lip several times and blackened my own eye with an assist from my sunglasses, which ended up forcefully stuck into my eye socket in one particularly spectacular fall.
I’ve fallen in gyms, on running trails, in the middle of the street in Quebec City, as my body bounced to the sounds of Canadians yelling “Mon Dieu!” I have tripped over string. Yes, string. I owe written apologies to countless skiers whom my hurtling form imperiled during the few winters I tried vainly to…
