I'm nervous. What I'm so nervous about, I wasn't sure.

It was just a stupid ball. My professional team was going to be there. Yet this would be my first time dancing in front of anyone that wasn't my instructor. I was confident; I was more than confident, honestly. While I had only been dancing a handful of months, I knew I wasn't going to make an ass out of myself. That said, I also knew a prerequisite to being invited was that you had to know how to dance (which I assumed was why Jake and Ben flew home).

While I don't want to sound cliché, I think a small part of me might have known what was in store for me that night. So as I slipped on my half-mask, staring at myself in the mirror, adjusting my cape nervously, I think I knew this wasn't only nerves about dancing in front of a room full of people. These were my friends. My colleagues. My cohorts. Yes, of course Scott had invited his movie star friends as well. But largely I knew everyone who would be in that room. Sure, they would be hidden behind masks, but I knew everyone.

Looking back on it, I definitely sensed a shift. It's funny because, in these moments, these micro fragments of time, you're always sort of perturbed by an unsettling feeling. You're not sure why, but everything--your entire reality--feels on a tilt.

As I made my way to the ballroom, down one of the many grand staircases of the winding chateau that was Scott's house, I thought that shift I felt was just my new found confidence. I thought it was me merely being cognizant of how far I had come. Naively I tried to dismiss the kilter my world had suddenly taken on.

I wasn't fixed. When you deal with a severe mental illness, there's not really an end line. Sometimes there can be, but I knew realistically that wasn't in store for me. Everything from a year ago I had told Jake had been true. I was the crumpled tin foil, the shattered glass, the ripped shirt never to be sewn back together properly.

Now though, after two rehab stints and a suicide attempt, I had finally begun to accept things. I accepted things for what they were, as they were. As I opened up the large double-doors that held the ballroom behind them, and as everyone clapped and cheered, I grinned.

For the first time, perhaps ever, I could look back on everything that had happened to me with some semblance of peace. As I walked through the crowd, and people congratulated me on a phenomenal comeback, told me how wonderful it was that I had given such a heart-felt interview, well...For the first time, I believed in myself.

For the first time, I wasn't living because I had to. I wasn't just raging against the pain, fighting to survive just so I could prove everyone who had ever gotten in my way that they were wrong. There were no expectations I was trying to live up to. I no longer feared being good enough--I was good enough.

And as we began to dance, after toasts had been made in my honor, I didn't feel like an imposter. I was talented; I knew I was talented. Yes, sure, perhaps I originally played my best in an attempt to "keep up" with Jake and Ben. Yeah, sure, maybe for a long while I was doing a "fake it 'til you make it" routine.

Yet as the dances slowly melted into one another, and the night slipped onward and unfolded before me, a realization hit me. It didn't matter if I had faked it. It didn't matter if I had felt like I was just limping along in life, waiting for something bad to happen, expecting everything to crumble around me. None of it mattered because, the fact of it was, I was still standing.

Motivations behind it didn't matter. The fact that I went through everything I had in life, well...It mattered, but it also didn't.

Yes, my trauma made me who I was. But for the first time, as I ended up dancing with another man by sheer accident, I felt like I could look at my life as someone standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, looking down at the mountain. Even when the costume this man wore reminded me of Queen, and inevitably Tristan, the thought of Tristan didn't immediately shatter me. For the first time, I felt at peace with my struggles.

For the first time, I felt at peace with myself.

And as the dance ended, and the man before me bowed and swept off his mask, I truly knew I had come full circle.

"T-Tristan?"

"Hey, Orio."

The End