Shaking

I'm fairly certain all of you know this already, but I have a tremor. My hands are always shaking. I've always had it, so far as I can remember, but it was always mild enough that it wasn't worth doing anything about. I could play the violin, so obviously it wasn't interfering with my daily life that much.

However, in the past year or so, it has gotten a lot worse. While most people used to only notice it if they were touching my hands, now it is clearly visible. It interferes with a lot of things. I have a very hard time carrying a cup with liquid in it; if I don't use both hands, I'll definitely spill it. Even eating has become difficult. It's hard to keep food on the end of a fork or between my chopsticks long enough to get it to my mouth. I hate trying to hand money to cashiers because I can't keep my hands still.

Where this has become the most frustrating for me is in the classroom. The students can very obviously see that my hands are shaking, and it doesn't slip past their notice. It isn't that big of a deal at the elementary schools; usually one or two kids will come up to me after class and ask me about it. Are you cold? Are you okay? Once I tell them that my hands always shake, they seem to be fine with it. But at the junior high, it has become very frustrating. On a number of occasions I've seen the kids (usually boys) imitating my hands, to the laughter of the other students. I think to myself, "They're old enough to know better than that", and then I remember that they're in junior high. So they're just old enough to know better than to mock other people, and just immature enough that I should count on them to do it every time. I would say that it feels like being a junior high student all over again, except that it doesn't. No one at North Junior High ever made fun of my hands. Maybe it's because it wasn't so obvious back then, but I don't think that's it.

So far my approach has been to ignore it. If I acknowledge that it bothers me, they'd probably do it even more. And really it wouldn't bother me to be made fun of if it weren't something that I've actually been concerned about. I mean, nearly every day someone laughs about the way I say things, in Japanese or in English. That doesn't upset me. But I have been really unhappy about how much worse my tremor has gotten, so it frustrates me to have it drawn to everyone's attention. When I come back home to visit I plan on talking to a doctor about it, but until then I can't do much but live with it.