BOOM.

What a crazy week of crazy emotions this has been.  Sure, some of you are making me utterly INSANE (but I still love you, anyway).  I don't really know why my tears and sadness = inability to let go, but luckily there are other people who I don't even need to explain it to in the slightest.  It's wonderful.  And sure I'm scared for today.  Do I really want to be in the lion's den?  And on a day that is so incredibly important to me?  HELLS NO.

Then I hear the right piece of music and I see an image in my head and I remember that I have the best fortress of friends in the entire world.

Pretty sure those lions are under my control.

And then reality comes in, and I'm insanely grateful for safety and happiness and love amongst the chaos of the natural and unnatural elements of this world.  

Then Starry Eyed Surprise comes on in my shuffle in iTunes.

Once upon a time I loved a boy and I got into the ballroom world.  It was scary and fun and wonderful and not unlike pageants at all.  I danced in ugly rented dresses with bad hair and bad makeup and bad dancing - sometimes we made a few cuts of Novice, maybe a cut or two of Pre-Champ.  But something magical happened: I found Smooth.  And Andrew and I came together under quite fortuitous circumstances, and it has developed into such a rewarding partnership that I have loved and I will miss.

Life happens and people change and realities evolve, and while my relationship status has surprised, and often discouraged, me over the last few years, dance has been the light in the uncertainty of my self-awareness.

Sometimes things end.  And sometimes we still feel the bitterness and the pain from those endings.  It doesn't mean we're stuck.  I think it means that we're human, and that we really loved, and that we really lived those experiences - bitter and beautiful.

So today I am reconciling my past, because without it, I would not have been led to the circumstances I find myself in today.  They're not perfect, and they're a little messy, and there comes all of this pressure with actually being a really competitive Amateur couple - but I never imagined that it would be me.  What an experience it has been.  Maybe it will continue, maybe it won't.

But thank you, Past, for what you have been.

Come see Andrew and Jen kick serious you-know-what at the Marriott Center at 5:45 today.  I'll be the one looking like a disco ball.  

Because I can.