Diana Chenette

I'm Okay Diana Chenette

If there were such a thing as two kinds of people in this world, they might be the ones who have to figure things out and the ones who don't. The author would fall into the first group, literally, because why else would anyone want to get to the bottom of being a lifelong klutz? Believing there is a reason for everything, and not having the resources for the years of psychoanalysis it would probably take to get some answers, she set out on a writing mission to document and classify the numerous incidents and events that had led her to despairingly lay claim to that ignoble honorific: Klutz. Indeed, when she told her friends that she was writing a book about being a klutz, either their faces froze over or they fell silent on the phone as if she had just told them she was conducting drone strikes from home. I don't know you that way, they said, as if they were going to have to re-evaluate the friendship. But she knew she had to see the project through because she was at her wits' end trying to turn from booby to swan. It turned out nine months was all it took. And the answer had been there all along, from the beginning, staring her in the face. It came like a 'we interrupt this programming' bulletin on the TV which, in an instant, made everything clear. The author is deeply grateful for the life-changing revelation, and for the entire experience. But she is especially grateful for the surprising two years of helpless laughter, in place of the expected weeping and gnashing of teeth, that tickled her through to the end.