I want to get righteous about the epic fall I took yesterday, but the facts are these: I was walking under a tunnel near my apartment that I have walked through almost every day for nearly 3 years. I have never, ever fallen. So I can’t squarely blame the square-shaped mini-manhole that happened to be the exact size of my crutch’s rubber tip and evidently as deep as the Earth’s core. I was actually writing a rather dramatic letter in my head, which I would later go home to fill half a notebook with. In the course of composing this emotional letter that I may or may not send, book that it is, that tip went to the depths of the mini-manhole.
And I went right down with it.
My elbow’s still not happy with this turn of events, and because it was a lovely day and I was on my way to the gym, I was wearing shorts. My knee looks worse off than it actually was. More than anything, it was embarrassing, though no one was walking through the tunnel at that point: anyone who saw was a passing driver. Still, no matter what, falling is not fun, and while it doesn’t play the role in my life that it did when I was a child, it still gives you a lot of things to wonder.
Like: how much of falling is mental? If disability has you on Medicare insurance, as mine currently does, you have to give the government these regular updates on The State of Your Tax-Funded Body (some of these taxes are my own) via a questionnaire. One of the questions they ask you is how often you’ve fallen in the past several months. They say an increase in the number of falls in your week can be a sign of depression.
How necessary is a square-shaped mini-manhole? It must be there for a reason. Of course, I’ve never noticed it or thought about it until my elbow and my knee angrily wanted to know.
One very, very, very bad Christmas, I was in New York with Ian’s family, practically choking on depression, and when he and I were walking alone, I fell on the sidewalk in front of, we were in New York, a lot of people. What happened next was cinematic and oddly satisfying: they all gasped in unison. It was sweet. The fall wasn’t nearly as bad as many I’ve taken so I could comfort them right away. But what really stood out in this moment was how much those strangers seemed to care.
When I had COVID, it messed with my balance, and I fell a lot in my own living room. That was no picnic, for my body or the ego. Even though no one was here to see it, it felt like bad slapstick, me falling around in my own damn house. I’m suddenly reminded of the protagonist of Twilight, Bella Swan, who was famously always falling. This was an outward manifestation of her frailty or damsel-in-distress-type feminity, I think? My homegirl Ally McBeal, also often falling. I don’t know what to do with “pretty white girl falling” as a pop culture staple. Let me know if you have any ideas.
Once, at perhaps my most physically optimal, I tripped and automatically fell on all fours, transforming at last into my childhood hero, Catwoman. That felt like I was finally coming to own the control over my body that forces unnumbered have historically insisted I don’t have. Yes I do. It just takes work that not everyone without a disability can imagine themselves doing. It’s amazing what the non-disabled will project for our “benefit.”
I mean, you know, the not-awesome ones who don’t read Hot and Disabled.
