grace under fire

today, i rolled my ankle. i stepped out of the car, caught my heel on a thoroughly-invisible lumpy place in the pavement and went down on one knee like i'd been shot. swollen ankle, sore knee, sore hip, and weirdly, sore neck. (i strained my neck monday night - don't ask how - and reaggravated it when i fell.) i got up, reassembled myself and walked into the drugstore. good thing i was already there; i bought an ankle brace, to add to the four i already owned, then put it on as soon as i got back.

good lord, i'm in pain. but what's worse is that no one i know reacted to this with the typical level of shock that usually accompanies an adult falling down. no one said, oh my god! are you okay? good grief, how did this happen? no, what i got was, there you go again, haha. you're okay? good. damn, you're clumsy. another day, another fall, eh? sigh.

there was a time when this was funny. i know there was. but more and more, it's just getting old. i hurt myself so many times in a given day. i cut my finger the other day while sitting still in a car, holding a plastic box of salad. i do stupid damn things all the damn time, and the result is pain every damn day. i've never been particularly physically capable. i used to walk into door jambs and fall down constantly as a small child. daddy always called me "spatially gifted," which was his kind way of saying, good christ, my kid's a klutz. this is nothing new.

but what is new is this feeling of dread when i move around in the world. i should be able to walk places, do things, live my damn life without stupid little injuries. the joke on me shouldn't be, we have to wrap her in bubble wrap to get anywhere. but it is. i feel like a constant, never-ending punch line. there are other things that feed into this feeling, predominantly the new information that, apparently, i'm the most serious, joyless person on the planet (another rant for another time), but it's largely the clumsy, stumbling way i move through the world that makes people laugh at me.

i feel like a joke all the time with this. but i don't know what to do; i am already so careful that the other punch line about me is that i am the queen of the obsessive-compulsives. i don't know how to fix it. so this is my cross to bear, i guess: i lack grace, and everyone in my life gets to have a nice chuckle at my expense. over and over. forever and ever, world without end, amen.