I couldn’t wait to get back to work. It had been four months since I had last been on stage, and I was bursting with excitement to get back to my job. Back to Broadway, to the lights and the crowds, the dancing and the singing. Back to my family of a cast in the theatre. It happened while I was performing my favorite part of the show– soaring through the air on aerial silks. They hung long from way up in the rafters and carried me through 8 shows a week until one time they didn’t. This time they nearly ruined me instead, herniating three discs in my neck, and causing nearly half of a year in recovery. I got horrifying injections in my neck and did miserably uncomfortable therapy appointments three times a week– I even got a tattoo on my neck of a flower that symbolizes healing and renewal to mark this time of recovery. I was ready, I was healed and strong, it was time. Time to get back to the things I love.

Right?

Well, sometimes the path of life doesn't quite work that way. Sometimes, we are suddenly knocked off our feet, catapulted a thousand miles away from the path, and made to crawl our way back without any directions. These upheavals seem to happen when we need a change, a shift in perspective, an altered route… the times when we clearly need a wake-up call. I apparently needed about five wake-up calls in my early 20s, and they all took on wildly different forms. The most notable, I’d say, took the form of a 5,822-pound vehicle, a mere eighteen days after I had finally made it back to my home on the stage.

“It’s okay.” Those were the first and only words I was able to muster after flying through the air like a ragdoll, and I said them to the person responsible for propelling me into this unwelcomed – and certainly unexpected – flight. A few moments earlier (moments that felt like hours), my senses awoke to palms filled with gravel, a mask of blood, a sharp hole where one of my teeth had been, and what I imagine it would feel like to be set in hardening concrete. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Passersby surrounded me to help in the limited ways strangers can help in times of tragedy. 911! The police and ambulance were there in minutes. The only things I could see were tears mixing with the blood pouring from my face to the street and the red, yellow, and blue lights swirling around me. Everything else blurred into the crazed background of midtown Manhattan, one block off of Times Square in New York City.

I started to understand what was happening, rather, what had happened to me. I had been walking from an audition to – ironically enough – a physical therapy appointment. I acutely remember standing on the curb waiting for the walk sign. This was an inconsistent habit of mine while living in New York City; jaywalking is, unfortunately, the typical method used by locals. No one can be bothered to wait for anyone or anything; but I was crossing the street right by Port Authority Bus Station – one of the busiest intersections in the city – so I waited. I recalled this moment in its rarity. “But, I actually waited for the walk sign,” I thought as the ambulance sped me up the East Side of Manhattan. 51st Street, 52nd, 53rd. Where are we going? I can’t to this day tell you the name of the hospital I was brought to that night, the place I would spend the following weeks being tested and scanned and neglected and medicated.

I must also point out that in the midst of this seemingly never-ending year of trauma, I came out as gay to my family. Well, I was actually forced out by an individual (a fellow cast member) who had feelings for me – along with a variety of clinically psychotic symptoms – and was upset by the absence of reciprocation. She emailed my mother exposing my sexuality, and proceeded to post endless crass statements about me on the internet until the sun came up the next morning. I watched them pour onto the public domains and deleted each one as it was posted. I had been out to my friends, but not yet to my family. I was waiting for the right time, the time when I felt ready to have this life-altering conversation, and that was stolen from me. This individual’s irrational behavior caused the longest period of time I have ever gone without speaking to my parents. My parents hold a specific set of beliefs, and who I am didn't fit into them very well in the initial shock. We finally sat down together to have a productive conversation, but it remained an open and vulnerable wound for a solid couple of years following. I am now happily married to the woman of my dreams and she is an integral part of our family. “All’s well that ends well!” is a sentiment I have learned to keep close to my heart.

In 2012, I was on medical leave for four months for a severe neck injury, was prematurely forced into a coming out story that receives gasps whenever I share it with someone new, and was struck by an SUV running a red light at one of the most pedestrian-heavy intersections in New York City. I will never be able to forget the sight of those headlights speeding in my direction as I (thank God) happened to look to my left barely in time to get one leap away from his path. If I had not coincidentally turned my head and taken that singular leap, I am certain my time on earth would have been limited to those prior 23 years. When I was hit, I was flung into the air and my flailing momentum was stopped by another vehicle on which the slamming of my head had left a dent. I landed on my hands and knees after suffering a broken vertebra, gashed face, shattered tooth, and multiple fractures in my knee on impact. As I was slowly peeled out of my hunched concrete position onto the stretcher, I yearned to see the face of the person who had hit me. The medics pointed in his direction, so I peered out of salty blood-crusted eyes and said with a mangled half-smile those freeing words of forgiveness, “It’s okay.” I hadn’t quite grasped the feeling of true forgiveness until this moment, when it spilled out of my mouth nearly unconsciously.

Hurricane Sandy had just pummeled the East Coast, so when we got to the hospital, it was a madhouse. All the rooms were full, nurses and doctors were frantically speeding in every direction, and I was placed on a gurney in the hallway next to the emergency room nurses’ desk for six hours as my face continued to harden with blood and I soon realized that my left leg was not working. I couldn’t get it to move, I tried with every ounce of energy I could find in my body. This incapacity didn’t seem to be of great concern to anyone but me. I was quickly taken back for a scan to look at my skull and brain, but once they ruled out any serious brain trauma, I was left to lay in the agony of wondering if I would ever dance or walk again.

“But my leg isn’t working!” I pleaded with the nurses who came by once an hour. I quickly learned the hierarchy of attention in an overflowing emergency room. No brain damage? Still breathing? You can wait. Thank God my mom jumped on the first flight out of Minneapolis and was by my side in a few hours. We would soon spend Thanksgiving together in my hospital room, just the two of us. We ate a delicious feast that a friend brought us from Whole Foods, unfortunately, none of which I could keep down. I had never known the violence that allergic reactions can cause in our bodies until those days of filling my tank with any narcotic that would ease the cocoon of pain that surrounded me.

I sobbed in the street the first time I walked alone in Manhattan after my mom left. I have never felt so alone. I have never hidden so much in my life, felt so ugly or vulnerable, or so afraid. I would soon encounter the most severe bout of depression I have ever experienced, and the most dramatic form of “rising from the ashes” I hope to ever experience. I would have a blackout panic attack on stage in front of 2,000 people, and learn what it means to live with PTSD-induced anxiety, something that has yet to subside. I would realize a lot about how unpredictable this life is, how vulnerable we are every day, and how much I cherish my ability to walk, dance, learn, and breathe. I would part ways with people who were hurting me, and make better efforts toward those who aligned with the kind of person I was, and still am, trying to be. I would break up with my girlfriend who had been incredibly generous and supportive throughout my recovery, and unintentionally break her heart. I would claw and pick and climb through the mess of a life surrounding me and find myself on the other side, healthy and new by the grace of God. I would finally, after nearly three years of working in the same building but somehow managing to always miss each other, lock eyes with the woman I would someday ask to spend forever with me. I would ask her to come watch me be baptized as an adult at my church on the East Side of Manhattan as I took a new kind of leap into a new kind of life.