Produce Your Life

BY MICHAEL HAUSER

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend? Everyone thinks you’re gay,” said my younger brother Stephen back in 1977.

And I’m thinking, “I’m 13 years old and my fucking younger brother is dating girls and I’m not. If he’s thinking why don’t I have a girlfriend, then everyone must be thinking that!” I began a tactical approach to survive this social disorder. My goal, to get a girlfriend. To fit in. To be like the other teenage boys. To hide behind a façade that was acceptable. To escape the feelings of inadequacies based on a gay landscape unfamiliar to me and to others, to lose my soul, myself. To do just that, and I did.

That was 30 years ago when being gay was something that was happening somewhere else, to somebody else, and certainly not to me. Following my survival instincts, I found myself dating a girl a few years younger than me. Her name was Lisa and she and I had a rocky relationship that lasted four years until I graduated high school in 1983. We smoked enormous amounts of pot, drank cases of Lowenbrau, experimented with acid and cocaine, and partied to the sounds of Journey, Phil Collins, and Run DMC.

Lisa was my beard and she played the part of a temporary band-aid for the slow unpeeling of my true identity that would eventually reveal itself. The years of hiding behind her, and being with her, had a lot of great memories and high times and it allowed me to fit in, to be like other teenaged boys, and mostly it saved me from being pushed around, beat-up, and humiliated by other schoolmates.

But underneath the façade of playing it straight and taking on a different identity was a troubled young kid tormented with identity issues and pain. Even though the physical and emotional abuse from others, outside of me, subsided because I took on another identity, the internal abuse of shame, guilt, anger, and self-hatred started to emerge within me. My unique queer energy was repressed, based on a society unwilling to accept life on life’s terms.

The power it took to hide, conceal, and lie about my true self had to come out some way, and it did. From cruising for sex at a very young age, to compulsive masturbation in the school’s restroom, to lighting fires in neighboring fields—all these acting-out behaviors were the result of society telling me, “No, you can not be who you are.” Thankfully, I lived through it all.

In conversations with Lisa years later, she expressed that I hadn’t been completely present with her, especially when having sex. She was right. Often I was fantasizing about her hunk of an older brother who was on the football team.

Does the memory of your childhood keep you revisiting the yearbook of yesterday, of days gone bye, keeping you stuck in a vortex of histrionics—paralyzing you from moving forward into the uncharted waters of the future? What unique energy are you repressing? What talent, quality, uniqueness are you bottling up and hiding?

Answering these questions gives us a compass, individually and as a community of gay men and woman, to live beyond our sexual identities and tap into our pure essence that can lift us up beyond any label. It’s about unearthing our uniqueness beyond our sexual tendencies. It’s a charge I have found to be ongoing in my life. To reveal my splendor, without labels, without an agenda, without trying to get something, or to get someone to do something.

As we come to understand that our real identity—beyond our sexual appetites, titles, and professional labels—is a Divine Presence that has a plan for us, we can begin to give ourselves the permission to relax into the presence that breathes us and wakes us up in the morning. A presence that has the intelligence to carry us through all of our hardships that we humanly go through. Whether you’re coming out, exploring new parts of yourself, sexually, spiritually, or whatever, there is enough room for you to be who and what you are to the fullest.

Can we live in complete trust in allowing the guidance system of our life to be in complete control? Are we free to be free from what people want us to be like, or to behave like—to fit into a role they assigned us to be? Can we begin each morning surrendering to a power and presence that created us to do through us what it created us for?

It’s insane to think we can’t. The peace of mind I continually seek for is not in the world, it is within me. And vice versa, the world that we experience is not out there, it is within us. When we begin to cultivate an interior awareness that life happens from the inside, we’ll begin to take inventory on what we’re entertaining in consciousness. As we’re moving through the channels of our mind, turning from fear to love, lack to abundance, anger to joy—we get to choose our perception, removing the facades, the beards, and the lies. These are steps toward our true selves, allowing ourselves to produce the kind of experience we want.

We each have a path to walk that is uniquely ours. Be true to yourself. Whatever labels you attach to yourself, know that it is not your real self. Whether you label yourself—bi, straight, gay, lesbian, a V.I.P, an artist, an entrepreneur—know that all these labels fade away and what remains is your true essence and spiritual identity. Our innate ability to become more of our true self is really why we are here. As we relinquish our attachment to labels, and status, we enlarge and expand our territory to create and to love, knowing we don’t have to hide behind anyone or anything.

Michael Hauser is an Agape Licensed Spiritual Practitioner, and a producer/director/writer of conscious TV. He can be reached through his website, www.livingvertically.com.