Am I just a clutz?

I’ve always been clumsy. My family says I’m as graceful as a bull in a china shop. It’s funny because I danced my entire childhood – ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop. Yet I still find a way to trip over the slight bump in the sidewalk and spill water all over myself consistently. I am no ballerina.

It’s weird when you have MS, you start to question everything that happens in your life. What’s that tingling in my hand? Is my foot really asleep or am I just losing feeling? Today, it was “did I just drop my entire bag down the stairs at work because I’m clumsy or because I have MS?”.

Yeah, you heard that right. My entire bag. My Bluetooth headphones bounced out of their case and down two flights. There was a fork there and a pill case here. And the noise it made in the 15 story stairwell was deafening. You’d think that I had fallen down the stairs (not a far-fetched assumption). I gathered everything as quickly as possible, only one person walked in as I was crouched over in a panic trying to clean it all up. To say the least, it was very embarrassing.

As soon as I got everything gathered and made it to my destination I started thinking “wait, was that MS? Did I lose feeling in my hand and didn’t notice? Did my brain not send the right signals to my hands? Is this my future???”

The answer with all of these things is I don’t know. That’s my reality. My anxiety has been getting the best of me these past few months. I am trying to live in the moment, appreciate the life I have while I have it. It’s hard. Everything is hard. But now I am laughing every time I think about my headphones bouncing around a stairwell! It was pretty funny….