Finding myself suddenly lame makes me feel, well, lame. Rather than bum luck, my bum ankle symbolizes my inability to maintain both my balance and the structural integrity of my skeletal system.

In short, this is somehow my fault.

It’s not like others are making me feel this way. In fact, I have been treated with nothing but compassion. It’s my own paranoia that informs me that somehow, between personal fundamental weakness and letting the cosmic ball drop, I have caused this.

Why do I feel this way? I thought back to third grade and the time I broke my ankle when a friend accidentally knocked me down the stairs. I arrived at school with a plaster cast and crutches, assuming I would be lavished with attention. Instead, my gym teacher, Mrs. Peterson, asked me if I had broken my ankle to get out of gym class.

Admittedly, I hated gym, because I had the kind of gym teacher who would tell a third grader on crutches that she suspected she had deliberately broken her ankle to get out of gym class. It started me wondering: could Mrs. Peterson and Sigmund Freud be right? Was it true that there are no accidents?

Over the past two days I’ve been giving this a good deal of thought, and concluded that I no more made my friend knock me down the stairs all those years ago than I caused myself to fall the other day. I have to quit thinking of myself as complicit in determining my fate and see myself for what I am: just another hapless victim of a random universe.

In other words, totally lame.