Because I've tripped over stuff all over the country

In the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, I walked right into a huge concrete bench. Bashed my shin pretty good. It was a joke for the rest of the week, how that non-moving bench jumped in front of me. 

In Dallas, I tripped over an orange traffic cone while doing a walkathon for some children's charitable organization that I don't remember the name of. Ha ha. So funny. Clumsy Sarah.

I walked into a low hanging tree branch during the Avon Walk for Cancer in Chicago. I thought I had more clearance than I did. Minor scalp wound. No harm, just embarrassment.

I've fallen over an ottoman in the library, right in front of the New Books section. Another ottoman in a local hotel where I was walking through their lobby on my lunch break to get exercise - fortunately no one saw me fall, and I quickly glanced around trying to figure out where the cameras might be that someone in the security department might be watching me and laughing at me from a control room somewhere.

"You don't have cankles, but you have a cankle," Chris said.

I missed a step walking out of a restaurant last night, twisted my ankle. Open door, huge step down. I'm pretty sure there was no sign.

Today, ibuprofen is my friend and it's still not entirely working. I've used a cold soda can as an ice pack. I prodded the skin, poking at the swelling and comparing my fat left ankle to my bony right ankle. 

My clumsiness was often the butt of jokes - the orange cones, that bench in Nashville - I trip over my feet, that thing jumped in front of me.

Knowing now that there's probably a reason - well, I don't know if that's better or worse. Is it better to know that I'm probably not really a klutz? I thought it would be, but if that were the case, I feel I could laugh it off.

I can't really laugh it off anymore.

Everything I've ever read about RP, people have said that they grow used to the bruises - to bumping their head on cabinet doors, to running into things - but in the aftermath of falling out of the door of that restaurant last night, all I felt was sadness.

Sadness that this has been there far longer than I've realized. That the times I thought I was just ungraceful, klutzy, the kind of girl who can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Knowing that it's probably been the RP all along isn't the reassurance you'd think it'd be.

My ankle is swollen. It hurts. 

As I caught myself when I fell last night, I walked away feeling mortified. Devastated. And I know this probably won't be the last time. 

I guess I'm not a klutz. Wish that didn't make me so sad.