We all feel like this sometimes, don’t we? Useless. Like whatever we try to do only makes things worse. All we do is mess things up.
I feel like that a lot.
Well, I guess it’s more like I used to feel like that a lot. It’s not so bad nowadays.
I mess up a lot. I always have. I am beyond clumsy, always breaking things and dropping things everywhere. It feels as if everything I touch somehow comes to life between my fingers and try their best to escape my grip.
Before, when I was younger and more easily disheartened, I blamed myself for all the clumsiness and for all my mistakes. I blamed myself and continued to blame myself for being stupid every time something didn’t go according to my plan. As you might know from my earlier posts about planning ahead, I did a lot of work trying to stop planning as much as I did. I got a lot better at it and I stopped always being angry with myself for messing up – not because I felt different or better, but because suddenly there were less plans to mess up.
Of course, blaming myself less and not being annoyed with my own inability to function made me feel better. At some point I realised that I felt completely useless for really strange reasons and I started to think more about why I always blamed myself for messing up a lot and things like being clumsy.
It was an odd realisation, I must say, when I began to understand that it had simply become a bad habit to always blame myself for my own stupidity. A bad habit is not fact, it’s just a habit. If we don’t like it, we can get rid of it.
There is no doubt that we all need to take responsibility for our lives, but taking responsibility does not at all mean we all have to go around and blame ourselves for things we can’t control.
I am clumsy, but it’s hardly my fault. I was just born very clumsy and I have to focus A LOT when I do things that require fine motor skills. I have tried to improve my fine motor skills and I still try, but apparently it just won’t ever be one of my better qualities.
That doesn’t make me stupid or useless, it just means I have to learn to fix things. That way, when I break it, I can fix it again. Apparently learning to fix it is easier for me than learning not to be clumsy.
This is a great example for what I want to say. I don’t blame myself for breaking things or being clumsy, because now I take responsibility for it.
I tried to improve, but my improvements are not working out as well as I had hoped. I won’t call myself useless just because I failed at improving my fine motor skills to a greater level, instead I found a new way to solve my problem: I am learning to fix things.
Instead of giving up and calling ourselves useless we should just accept that sometimes we can’t do things as well as we would like and try to find a different solution. We don’t all have to do things in the same way and if we can find our own path to whatever destination we have chosen, why does it matter if we took the one less travelled?
The answer is that it doesn’t.
We are never useless, but sometimes we feel like it. Feeling like that is probably even a good sign, because it means we must have tried a lot of different things without getting the result we wanted. In that case, we are much closer than ever to achieving our goal, because we don’t have to do all those things that failed again.
That doesn’t mean we don’t end up making the same mistakes over and over again, but I hope that we all find a way of breaking free of such a dark cycle.
I made the same mistakes so many times when I was younger. In a way, I feel grateful I did though. I feel grateful because now I truly know how it feels to make the same mistake too many times to count and I know, without the shadow of a doubt, that I never want to do that again.
Of course, I am still struggling with that. I often feel useless, even though I’m trying really hard to change my bad habit of blaming myself for things that are out of my hands. I practice trying to take responsibility, but sometimes it’s just so tempting to run away and hide while pretending I don’t need to do anything about it. Saying something, or in this case writing it, is much easier than doing it every day.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Messing up sucks. It always will. Why make it any worse? Isn’t it bad enough without us creating a fuss about it?
All we can do is take full responsibility for what happens to us and our own actions and forgive ourselves every time we mess up.
It’s silly, yes, I know, but I actually tell myself that I forgive myself every single time I’m clumsy and drop things or break things. It makes me feel a lot better about myself, and really, at first, I didn’t understand why or believe that it would. I just tested it out while I was testing out my little experiment with exchanging every negative thought I have for a positive one instead. That was the start of it all. It was more noticeable, I believe, because I was planning less ahead and had more awareness of my inner thoughts.
Of course, it still sucks.
It sucks that I fumble and drop things, it sucks that I constantly misjudge distances and walk into stuff. I drop things several times every day and I also walk into anything from door-frames to furniture to walls on a daily basis. I often find bruises and cuts that I have no idea where came from, so obviously I get hurt more than I realise.
When I cook, I burn myself regularly, but for some reason I never cut myself. I must have some super skill when it comes to handling knives, because I only ever remember cutting myself once. It was pretty bad though. I did once cut myself rather badly with a home-made flint axe, but that doesn’t count.
I am telling you this so you know I am aware of the things I can do. I know what I can, and I am in no way saying I can’t do anything whatsoever. I am not clumsy every second of the day, but enough for it to affect my life in pretty big ways.
When I type on my PC my fingers slip almost every sentence I write and lots of characters I didn’t intend to write are written in place of what I hoped to write. It’s not that I never learned the ten-finger system, I did, but my hands always shake a little. I used to be really scared that I was sick until I found out it was stress related.
Stress.
Shaking is common to me when I have my meltdowns, but during the day I shake too. I am stressed all the time, in fact, I hardly remember not being stressed – not since I was 7-years old. You might think I am kidding, but I was about 7 when I started mimicking people because I wasn’t sure how to deal with life. I was about 10 when I realised what I was doing, and I don’t remember not being scared and worried since then.
Once in a while, I wonder if my clumsiness might go away when I get less stressed. Then I wonder if I will ever get less stressed and then, well, then I get tired and sad.
The world we live in does a very good job of letting those of us who doesn’t fit in the normal boxes know that we don’t fit in. We are isolated, often by fear and hurt and not just desire. It’s difficult for me to imagine living in this world and not being stressed. So, I guess, testing whether or not I’ll be less clumsy and mess up less if I am less stressed is irrelevant. The only thing I do know is that it gets worse the more stressed and worried I am.
Clumsiness suck. It really does, but I have to live with it for now. I suppose a lot of us do.
If you are clumsy too, then you might have heard people say something like this: ‘Oh, I am sure you are not that clumsy. It only feels like that because it happens to you. No one else notices it.’
That is complete and utter nonsense.
I know, I know, there are people out there who never drop anything and then the one time the entire month they drop something they say: ‘[insert curse word of choice] I am always so clumsy!’
Well, not everyone is like that. I am not. I say things as I see it. I am always honest, even when people consider it rude. I try to talk politely to avoid being rude, but I often don’t even know what is considered to be rude.
It doesn’t feel like it is happening to people it actually happens to. Some of us are clumsy and some of us are truly struggling with this. It can be a real, deep-seated issue for us and when people disregard our feelings, we feel even more messed up – like it’s a personal attack on who we are. It’s just not something worth arguing about, even though I often feel like I should defend myself.
Maybe they just want to be comforting to us, maybe they don’t care at all. Whatever the reason, I don’t care or understand. And by the way, knowing whether or not others notice something isn’t comforting – it’s irrelevant. Unless you are literally asking whether or not others notice, I guess.
Those who aren’t clumsy just don’t understand what it’s like, they can’t even imagine. Messing up is a part of life, we all do it, but the degree to which we do is different. I wish more people would understand how debilitating being clumsy can be.
Okay, so I talked about feeling worthless and ugly last time and now I’m talking about feeling useless. You guess it. I’ve been feeling useless a lot lately. I don’t mind being born the way I am, but I hate feeling like I have no future.
My dreams are the same as everyone else’s, but because of a diagnosis, none of those dreams were ever able to come true. I am not saying I won’t be happy, but that we don’t all have the same opportunities to find happiness. Life should be different and perhaps it will be for the next generations of people on the spectrum. I hope it will.
Little things are important as well as the big things. When I noticed the negative self-talk I do when I’m clumsy and mess things up I knew I had to do something. I don’t need so much negativity in my life, it’ll only make me feel even more useless.
Again, just because we feel useless doesn’t mean we are. We all mess up, and yeah, it sucks, but we don’t have to focus on how much it sucks every day. Some days will be harder than others, but we can make it a little better some of the time and that’s worth it.
All we can do is forgive ourselves when we mess up – as often as needed – and move on.
