“One of the worst feelings is feeling helplessness. To realize that in certain situations you’re totally and completely powerless. That you gotta roll with the hard punches life will throw.” —Amitesh Kumar
Someone backs up and bumps into me in the hallway. I teeter sideways.
I’m walking in PE and I’m on my knees on the gym floor before I can even register what happened.
I try to step off the curb but fall to my knees on the sidewalk.
I attempt to run and play with my classmates at recess and end up on the grassy ground instead.
What do all of these have in common? I fall down, yes, and the tripping and falling is due to my cerebral palsy, yes—but more than that is the engulfing feeling of helplessness that overwhelms me in each scenario.
At some point I realized that I wasn’t “normal”—or like most other kids. There were rare occasions when a kid would bump into something and fall down, or trip over an obstacle in their way. But there weren’t many times where people tripped over what seemed like air.
I thought that as I got older, the falling would stop. My knees were pretty much always cut and scraped. When I was little, I feel like my falling didn’t matter so much because all little kids get into accidents. Also when I was little, I was shorter, so I didn’t fall from very high.
But the falling hasn’t stopped. And falling has almost become more emotionally draining than physically draining for me.
Most of the time, I fall frequently when my legs have the most spasticity—or basically, when my hamstrings are more tight. My muscles have more spasticity when I have a growth spurt. I can’t really predict when I’m going to fall. It takes me completely by surprise, which is why I feel so helpless when it happens.
I don’t have a lot of confidence. I tend to look down at the ground a lot. (For some reason I feel like if I make eye contact with people while passing them in a hallway, it’s like I’m challenging them.) I’ve tried to look up more lately because my posture had been causing problems with the nerves in my neck and arms. Looking up means that I don’t watch my feet, and that means I trip and fall frequently.
One of the worst falls I can remember is when I tripped going off the curb on the way to my mom’s car. I felt so helpless because the teacher on duty had to help me up and carry my bag to the car. I felt like a five-year-old who can’t carry her own stuff.
More recently, I fell during theatre rehearsal, which interrupted the scene. Interrupting the scene turned out not to be that big of a deal, but I still felt really bad about it. After a minute, I was able to stand up by myself, but I limped backstage and had to sit down.
Falls are really embarrassing. Not many fourteen-year-olds fall down frequently. At some point, I thought I would get used to the feeling, but I never have. There’s a brief moment in time when I don’t yet realize that I’m about to fall. I don’t really feel the weight of the tightness of my legs, or the drag of my feet. It is actually a freeing feeling, but in the millisecond after that, I realize that I’m going to fall down.
There is barely time for me to think before my body (usually my knees or occasionally a hip) slams into the ground. The impact usually takes my breath away. The pain is what I react to first. Unfortunately, I make a noise most of the time because it hurts so badly. When I fell during theatre rehearsal, I clutched my knee, in the middle of the stage, while trying to scoot out of the way.
Then the embarrassment hits. I usually think to myself, I hate my legs, as I force myself to my feet. I usually want to pretend that I’m someone else—someone who doesn’t fall constantly.
The pain isn’t really a big deal for me in the grand scheme of things. I am in pain every day. It’s the helplessness that sweeps me up, the self-hatred that chokes me. I’ll never get used to the impact or the feelings that come with the fall. I don’t want to be viewed as fragile—by myself or by others. I don’t have control over that, though.
All I can really do when I fall is make sure I get up and keep trying. CP might knock me down, but it won’t triumph over me for long.