I am a mover -- dancer, runner, cardio kickboxer, anything to keep from sitting still. But I haven't been able to move in awhile since I tore the meniscus in my right knee. I have been holding it together for several months, have taken well to pilates class and long walks in the park, but yesterday I found myself losing it.

I watched Quentin Tarantino on Charlie Rose and Lorena Bobbitt on Oprah, wrote a little, and then decided I should go to the first dance class I've attended in weeks. I don't know what I was thinking, perhaps I had just overcome the fear of re-injuring myself that kept me at home the entire week of Ronald Brown's intensive in Brooklyn. Well, dancing yesterday confirmed that my right leg has in fact been rendered lame by my torn meniscus.

I tend to move quickly without thinking much, in life and in dance, and it's largely why I hurt my knee to begin with. I threw my leg up too fast, I think, and it certainly could have been prevented if I had ever learned to move properly. There have been bits of myself falling apart for years, I suppose, but this seems so dramatic. To see my right leg shake just to support my body is like watching a new baby wobble. And I do not take well to infirmity.

Instead of crying, yesterday, I bought vegan chocolate chip cookies at Whole Foods. I find that comfort food, too, is not working anymore. Damn raw foods turned my system against all that is well and good in junk food. My stomach is okay, but my intestines cramp up and I end up doubled over.

At home at night, I lay in bed watching Star Trek on my laptop and icing my knee. The pain feels like a deep sting radiating out in concentric circles. I wanted to scream, to ask God why it is that my knee does not work any more. Why it is that the thing which brings me the greatest joy has been taken from me. I cannot express how stunning the physical and mental pain.

I read somewhere that, when life spins out of balance, one should seek the center of the wheel -- the self (I think). But I don't know what to do when the self is also spinning, exploding outward, collapsing.

I think perhaps the holding on to the wheel at all, to what is being lost, to what is not working, hurts far more than the letting go. Perhaps if I lost it, I might find some measure of relief.