“There’s no elevator in the theater,” the teenage ticket seller said.

“But that’s ableist!” I said. I shifted on my crutches.

The guy mumbled sorry like I was his grandma chewing him out for cussing. Sorry, I’d have to ask an employee to meet me at a side entrance on the second floor of the movie theater, exit through the lobby, hobble down the hallway, then up, over and back toward the screening room, which was on the far side of the building.

“It’s really not that far,” he said.

“Easy for you to say.” I huffed toward the stairs. They took 10 minutes to climb. My boyfriend had taken me to the movies to cheer me up, but I wasn’t cheered; I was fuming. When we got to the second floor, we were greeted by two women, one of whom was in a wheelchair. She gestured toward a dark hallway. “There’s an elevator, you know,” she said.

“I don’t need it,” I said without meeting her gaze. “I’m fine.”

But I did need it, and I wasn’t fine. In fact, I’d blasted my ankle in half a week before at a trampoline park. A silly injury for a grown woman, and far from the worst that I’ve weathered, if you count the stage III cancer (age 25), getting hit by a car (age 28), mononucleosis (age 20), PTSD (chronic), cysts (occasional) and sports injuries of all permutations.

With enough health crises under my belt to match an average senior citizen, I fancied myself rather wise, a sophisticated traveler between, as Susan Sontag writes in Illness as Metaphor, the kingdoms of the sick and well.

When my ankle broke, though, I behaved not as a sophisticated traveler but a petulant child. Before long I was changing clinics, scorning podiatrists, throwing tantrums with billing offices. Beneath my posture of fearless self-advocate was a primal resistance to swapping kingdoms. I do not belong here, I tried to explain to this medical cabal, this whole crowd of people insisting on treating me like a sick person. You must have me confused with someone else.

It’s not so much that I’m afraid of misfortune. It’s more a fear that the internal voice insisting my misfortune is unnatural – my suffering an aberration – is wrong. That I’m not more entitled to working legs than anyone else. Unsurprising, then, that when strangers asked about my injury I made sure to say it was temporary, and unsurprising in the saddest way that, when met with kinship by the woman in the wheelchair, I averted my eyes.

I did not want to take the elevator in the movie theater, or meet the gaze of the woman in the wheelchair, because to do so I would have to acknowledge two uncomfortable truths: one, that I am fragile; and two, that I am just like her. If fortune favors the bold, misfortune, in popular myth, is saved for the weak. In truth, we are all equally subject to misfortune. This is scary. Unsurprising, then, that our elderly are shuffled off to homes, that movie theaters like mine do the bare minimum to make their facilities more accessible to those abled differently.

These truths work in direct opposition to that insidious inner voice. And they tend to tumble into all sorts of other uncomfortable truths about the choices we make daily between compassion and self-interest, between being in the world and staying in an insulated, isolated comfort zone.

My neediness makes the customary isolation and insulation become impossible. The voice hates this. It roars louder about my exceptionalism. It throws barbs at hapless ticket sellers and ignores strangers who try to help me.

But I haven’t been in a position to heed the voice much since breaking my ankle. So out of necessity, I’ve learned that, if I can wrap my arms around this voice, something interesting happens. The root of the word able is from the Latin habere, which means to hold. The fear that I am no different from you, from the woman in the wheelchair, when held long enough, becomes the refuge.

I am frail, so are you; we must care for each other. I wish it did not take me breaking my ankle to remember this, but maybe it is only by breaking that I remember. The cracks are where we learn to see.