A year after I sat in that psychiatrist's office, learning to recognize what I had lost, I was back on the path once again to health, or to what I wanted to believe would be health. I was practicing tai chi every day, learning how to move slowly and gracefully through the world, as part of a group all making the same movements, synchronized, flowing. I felt more at home in my body, with other people's bodies, than I ever had.
Then it all came apart. My tai chi instructor kept explaining to me how to align my hips, kept looking at me quizzically and saying, "I don't know what you're doing that's wrong." Then one day, at home, I reached up for a book on a shelf and felt my hip separate from my body, pain zinging down my leg which quickly turned numb. It happened in a flash, and it also lasted forever. It took me six long months in physical therapy to get back to where I could walk more than a few steps, and I was never again able to walk as far as I had before. Tai chi, which I loved deeply and which was supposed to fix me, broke me instead. It moved in one direction and my body moved in another.
And so, I moved backward instead of forward, not into a state of health, but further into the world of disability, the world I was now coming to understand as my own. I moved from being someone who kept getting sick, over and over, to someone who was sick, all the time, whose inner clock was attuned to my own physical state rather than the external routines of a society ordered around bodies that were not like mine.
