They Called Me a Clutz

I learned the word ‘proprioception’ in my late twenties, in the best of all possible ways: the guy I was living with at the time told me, “Wow, you have really terrible proprioception.”

I was terrible at lots of things, but this one was new to me. Proprioception, it turns out, is about knowing the position of your body in space: feeling where the edges of your body are, without looking at them. It’s a physical sense — not as often mentioned as sight or sound, but pretty darned important for all of that.

The ex who gifted me this new bit of vocabulary had noticed that I bumped into things a lot — banged into furniture, doorways, and so on. He was right: my sense of proprioception is not great, and it never has been. It’s like being very hard-of-hearing, or extremely myopic … except without the equivalent to hearing aids or glasses. There is no wearable gadget that will correct a proprioceptive deficit.

This is what poor proprioception is like:

My husband and I have identical nightstands on either side of our king bed; unfortunately, they are about an inch taller than the top of the mattress on its base. I often sit up in bed to read; when I get up again, I hit my thigh against the sharp inside corner of the nightstand. This happens so often that I usually get a new purple bruise while the last one is still yellow and green. My thigh is decked out for Mardi Gras, permanently ready to party.

My husband sits up in bed too, and never has that problem. Here I am, ready to gnaw that corner off with my teeth if I have to, and I don’t think he even realizes the nightstand has corners.

Also, I have a lot of pale white scars on my hands and forearms from burning myself on ovens. I have developed a rabid loathing for ovens, because a miscalculation of just a centimeter or two when taking something in or out can result in a terrible, blistering burn.

No matter how careful I’m trying to be, I almost always miscalculate by a centimeter or two. It was bad enough in the States, but Mexican ovens — we live in Mexico now — are worse. The entire exterior of our oven gets hot, including the front, the sides, and the handle. You might as well just light me on fire.

I will also never be fast at chopping vegetables, even though I do it all the time, because the pro techniques all involve putting the knife right up next to your fingers, and I have learned the hard way that this is just never a good idea for me. If my attention wavers for even a second, so that I stop actively processing the visual input, I will most likely fail at placing the knife where I intend to. I have to leave enough space that I can miss by a centimeter without shearing off a centimeter of finger.

I gave up on buying stemmed glasses years ago; even for wine and cocktails, I use only stemless glasses with low centers of gravity. Even so, I have lost count of how many keyboards I have killed by bumping a drink and knocking it over — probably over twenty. I now keep a spare new keyboard around, just waiting for the next liquid catastrophe.

Did you know that proprioception extends to your vehicle, if you are driving? It does — or at least, it should. But mine isn’t good enough for me to risk driving in tight spaces, because too often I end up scraping a fender against something. And for the love of all that’s holy, don’t ask me to parallel park. Just don’t.

I bang my shoulders and hips into doorways so often that I don’t even notice it anymore. I hit my elbows on doorknobs. I nearly always have a bruise on one of my shins, and no idea where it came from. If the ground is at all uneven — tree roots pushing up the sidewalk, cracks or cobblestones — I have to carefully watch my feet at each step or else I’ll trip and fall.

As a child, people called me clumsy and a clutz, always with such a tone of contempt. I tried to be more coordinated, but it wasn’t anything I could control. I remember the balance beam in gymnastics: I could speedwalk the darned thing when I watched my feet. But the instructors always wanted me to look straight ahead, and that slowed me down a lot — I had to carefully feel for the beam with the soles of my feet. If I was urged to go faster, the result would be a tangled mess.

I hated every sport involving a ball, which naturally was almost all of them. I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life, rarely managed to hit one, and balls hurt when you missed them and they hit you. Balls flying at my face were terrifying. In volleyball I would duck and dodge rather than try (and likely fail) to hit them, to the disgust of everyone on my team.

It wasn’t just balls that were a problem, though. Take swimming: it only took a couple of times banging my head into the wall at the end of the lane until I started to slow down well in advance of the possibility. Like, half a lane in advance. Yeah, not gonna win any races that way.

I can run on a treadmill because it’s flat and the movements are repetitive. (Changing the speed on me is an act of cruelty, though.) But I can only manage weight training with the big machines that force your limbs into the correct angles. Give me free weights, and I flail around like a push puppet.

In a surge of unjustified optimism, I took a couple of dance classes as electives in college. I loved acting and singing, and all my friends were theater people; for theater people, dance is the necessary third point of the triangle.

It didn’t go well. I loved my tap class, but getting my limbs to go to the right places and do the right things was like herding cats. I would try to do a ‘flap’, which is where your weight is on one foot and you brush the ball of your other foot forward and then back along the floor, making a ‘ta-took’ sound.

About half the time I would miss the floor, flapping my foot silently in the air. Nothing will make you feel like an idiot faster than missing the floor.

There are several easy tests for proprioception. One is the drunk-driver classic: close your eyes, hold your arms out to the sides, and then bring one finger to touch your nose.

I can reliably find my nose with my eyes closed. I suspect it’s because my vestibular sense — which lets you perceive the location and position of your head — is not impaired. My nose doesn’t tend to wander around relative to the rest of my head, so locating it with my eyes closed is pretty easy.

But with the finger-to-thumb test, my proprioceptive deficit becomes apparent. It works like this:

1. Stand with your eyes closed and your arms straight out to the side.
2. Have someone position your open left hand somewhere in the space in front of you.
3. Bring your right forefinger to touch your left thumb.

How far off are you? Out of curiosity, I tested this multiple times with my non-autistic spouse and a friend with whom I had lunch with last week. Both of them are right-handed, and they touched their left thumb with their right finger perfectly. When reversing hands, so that their non-dominant hand was moving, they were both an inch or so off.

When I try it, I am always several — four to six— inches off with either hand. Oops?

Poor proprioception is a thing I’ve lived with my whole life and honestly never gave much thought to until recently. Even when I learned the word, I thought it was neat to have a name for it, but it didn’t change anything. I bumped and bumbled, burned and bruised my way through life just the same.

And then, a few months ago, I learned that poor proprioception is a common autistic trait. It was one of a long list of things that led to my ‘Holy Crap I’m Autistic’ epiphany.

It was only as a result of the ensuing research that I also found out that my tendency to slump and lean on things — which has remained pretty much unchanged throughout my life — is likely also a function of my proprioceptive deficit … as opposed to a sign of inherent laziness and poor character, as my mother believed.

In fact, all the ways I naturally choose to stand — almost always on one leg with the other out to the side, sometimes with my feet completely crossed over and my legs pressed tight together — are also things that autistics do to compensate for poor proprioception. As with so many things (so many!) that I’d always chalked up to my own personal brand of weird … nope. It’s just autism.

My proprioceptive deficit is mild, and I don’t consider it truly disabling — more like annoying and inconvenient. Bruises and burns notwithstanding, I compensate with vision well enough to get by in most circumstances. Yet it’s true that certain professions are closed to me: I’d never make a dancer, or a truck driver, or an athlete, or a chef.

Proprioceptive deficits come in many different degrees and can have many different causes. A lot of them are degenerative diseases, and if you become noticably clumsier as an adult, you should probably talk to a doctor about that posthaste.

Me, I’ve been ‘clumsy’ as far back as I can remember — which makes sense, given that autism is a lifelong condition. Though autism is neither degenerative nor curable, it’s something I wish I’d known about myself a lot sooner. I don’t think there’s enough awareness of the full range of autistic symptoms and traits, and though clumsiness by itself isn’t enough to indicate autism… if your kid is clumsy, the whole situation is worth a closer look, even if you think she couldn’t possibly be autistic. Autism spans a much, much wider range than most people realize.

Clumsiness is treated like a character flaw, something worthy of scorn; it’s assumed that people can overcome it if they would just put in the effort.

Honestly, I really wish people would stop using the word ‘clumsy’ altogether, at least as applied to people rather than things. Clumsiness is treated like a character flaw, something worthy of scorn; it’s assumed that people can overcome it if they would just put in the effort.

I’ve looked through research archives for scientific evidence that there is even such a thing as clumsiness outside of a sensorimotor deficit, and I haven’t found it. It’s entirely possible that clumsiness is always just a form of disability. Which in turn would make ‘clutz’ about as ridiculous and cruel as calling someone ‘four-eyes’ because they wear glasses.

Like everything else about my autism, knowing that there is a physical reason for my clumsiness — that I have a proprioceptive deficit that no amount of practice will ever correct — means that I can plan for it. I’ve hurt myself far more than was necessary by trying to live up to a neurotypical ideal of agility and grace. I can make better decisions now, like avoiding narrow streets with crowded side parking, or asking my husband to take stuff in and out of the oven for me.

I still might have to chew the corner off my nightstand, though. It’s a menace, I tell you. A menace.

9 December 2019

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