infinity dies in the closet—come out!
a letter: an olive branch to my estranged daddio; an invitation to explore new dimensions of love, beyond dogma & duality.
i recorded a few excerpts from this letter. listen to them all or look for them peppered throughout this letter. here’s the first one:
hi daddio!
i love you.
i love you because you made sundays a weekly caesar-salad, father-son lunch date.
i love you because you get ridiculously excited about watermelon.
i love you because you write incredibly corny picture captions and laugh at them shamelessly.
i love you because when you go into a forest, you plant your feet, lift your eyes, inhale real big and exhale out all your troubles. and you smile.
i love you because you love sharing that experience.
i love you because you can’t help but care for others.
i love you because you are silly.
i love you because you love love.
i was nervous about telling you the truth. i didn’t want to lose the hard-earned respect that you started to give me once i got the job at amazon. you were finally treating me like an adult, like a mind worthy of your time.
but your heart is huge and i know you’ll always love me. i’m your son. that’s why i had to let you into my life. my real life. i needed it and so did you.
i am excited—and a little anxious—to start this new chapter with you—getting to know each other again, beyond father and son, beyond labels.
come into my life, share in my journey! let’s think & learn together. process through life together. let’s expand our minds by working to understand each other & build new empathy to grow our imagination.
herein are some things about me that i haven’t shared with you over the years. some events and ideas that have shaped who i am.
i hope you see this letter as an invitation to a new relationship — we don’t know each other very well and that sucks. when i’m old and gray, i wanna look back at life and see that my dad and i lived it together.
it may not seem like it yet, but this is the best thing that has ever happened to both of us. we are human—stubborn creatures of habit that only ever change & expand when called to consider the yin to the yang of our firmly held beliefs——and we answer—
—our last chat was the beginning of that process.
let’s expand. whaddya say?!
thank you so much for keeping our our last call civil. even though we gently argued about nature versus nurture, pushed and pulled each other to see things differently, and ultimately resigned ourselves to a broken understanding between us, at the end you said i love you. so despite our disagreement, those three words gave me a massive catharsis.
i set down the phone afterward and jumped around the house like a monkey, sputtering & belting nonsense! i climbed on furniture, i was screeching loudly, hanging from a spiral staircase, i sprawled out on the couch arm doing lion’s breath, i ran in circles with horsey mouth — i shaped myself into the weirdest me i could be. then i peed and passed out on the ground.
i was overwhelmed, invigorated with that feral feeling — i found movement! years of hiding from you had ended, and the possibility of an honest relationship finally became a reality…
i had also finally taken action to cement my belief that i am who i am and there is not a damn thing i can do to change it. paradoxically, i was also suddenly freed from that idea: maybe there is a way to change…
our chat often stalled because we have different ideas of free will. every epiphany i have unveils more about the mystery of will power, about control. and now, i don’t believe in traditional free will.
rather than strangling reality in an endless pursuit to make myself other than i am, rather than believe in free will, i’m starting to accept that the only power at my disposal is focus. awareness. my single point of control is what i focus on and how i focus on it. my reality is affected only as a secondary and indirect result.—
i wrestled myself to fit molds for so long — high school cliques, religious tradition, society’s ought & to-do, television’s nightmare caricatures of humanity— constricting myself had become a comfortable habit. i was addicted to feeling stagnant & stale. lacking vitality, i was stuffed up with distress & discontent; an infinite cycle of critique and constipated efforts at self-improvement—
—obsessions rooted in goals. having an end. living entirely in the experience of finite time. finite endings…
i must get a job or i will not survive. i must go to school or i won’t get hired. i must obey the law or else i will be persecuted. either-or. yes-no. ought-not. binary.
and yes, of course, that is a useful experience, and yet i feel stuck when it is my only mode of existence. i feel this drive to chase after infinity too; to know not only what reality looks like when my perception is binary but also to see what it looks like if my perception were to see everything as one, alan watts’ non-duality.
i’ve felt the most alive, the closest to infinity, when i practice melting into fear and uncertainty—when i surrender control. to avoid feeling stuck, to find movement, i need the mysterious expansiveness of infinity just as often as the comfortable womb-glow of binary.
i need to oscillate, but right now i only know how to view reality as binary, as a divided material world of things. so i’ve been taking a good look at awareness and slowly finding ways to renegotiate all of my basic assumptions about how i see the world, how i see myself.
my perception of the world is affected by my focus, my behavior is the same as the behavior of the entire universe. the people i meet, the smiles i return on the street, the lights i miss on the way to the store, the stars that shine their light into my eyes, everything that greets me in everyday experience is my behavior.— my reality as The Manifestation of my Self
in college, i began to intellectually question our obsession with control. the years since have been increasingly bipolar: oscillating wildly between new extremes of self-affirmation and despair.
and i wouldn’t have it any other way, it’s the best life i’ve had—instead of bound up with binary concern of endlessly doing, doing, doing in order to be as secure as possible in my desire to thrive for eternity, now i practice surrendering to myself, exploring this life—all of this input—with a new mind, one that isn’t always dominated by the worldview that we are all in competition, that i have to fit in to survive, that i have to bend the world to my will, that i require power.
surrender, power, oscillate.
as my college years come to an end, i stop shaming & hating myself for being attracted to men. i begin to shift my focus. i begin to treat myself with a curious, graceful mind instead of a judgmental, controlling one.
as my feelings start to unfold without reservation, with less constriction, i can see them more clearly: a focused witness of myself. i begin to see others differently, to treat people more gently, to want to understand them because i want to understand myself, because i am less afraid of and disappointed with myself. — i begin to accept myself and my “imperfection” and find it easier to do the same for others.
what i can’t do for myself, i cannot do for others.
i learn to focus my mind’s power on observing and surrendering to my nature—including my so-called “sinful gayness”—rather than using my mind to endlessly judge and berate myself.
…i’m just telling you all this because it is a ground truth for me — i hope it will help you see the plain reality of who i am…
rewind a bit. third year of college. i’m twenty one, confused about my major, my orientation, my personality. i am lonely: my internal critic filters out the value of other people so thoroughly that i connect rarely. i am (self-)tortured: i wonder why god would create a person just to be condemned by the religions of the majority, especially since my attraction to men always felt natural to me, it felt cosmically correct—it is love after all, of course it did.
but scripture says that i am not to be accepted.
so, i turn to sacred text for understanding. i start reading the qur’an and the bible. the stories are not in a familiar dialect, they are cryptic and isolating. the circumstances are hard to relate to. the stories of human aggression are not experiences in my everyday life. the strict rules and boundaries create an atmosphere of judgment and dissociation. rigid dogma, a world of unquestioned belief and of ends with means left unsavored. a hapless desire for consistency & rigidity rooted in the fear of death, the unknown.
and then, i gave up religion.
final year of college. the universe blesses me with chris hasson—a bright light for my dimmed mind; he is a gentle, sensitive soul intent on changing the world—in a way that reminds me of you. he’s another seeker, curious about the mystery of life. the first boy to sweep me off my feet; — - — he showed me how to love myself as a gay man.
he’s goofy like you too: he loves cheesy puns! he has riveting drive that persists year after year: a zen teacher of focus. he tells the most captivating stories, thinking audience-first, focused on creating joy from his words, convincing me that performance is supremely important when sharing experiences. he was an example of love: insatiably curious with wide-eyed & steely passion, he inspired me to believe in possibility, with impeccable timing—right when religion had stopped being a source of hope for me.
we were partners & lovers exploring the world. diving down internet rabbit holes. building ideas and apps. we threw ourselves into uncertainty and built two businesses together. we struggled with self-belief & fear. we built each other up, we put ourselves out there and learned to fear less…
up until i met chris, most of my mental energy was spent resisting my nature: years of self-hatred and self-flagellation for my attraction to men. even something as natural as masturbation stabbed me with relentless guilt and self-deprecation. god, i was so sad, i felt so much despair.
i couldn’t stop my feelings or uncover my eyes to see the barrier of dogma which i used to quash my own thirst to explore existence. once i questioned the reasons for that guilt, investigated the feeling—focused, meditated—i released the habitual comfort of religion & society and started to explore the nature of existence for myself.
uprooted from blind, subservient reverence, my nature is curious and celebratory!
melting into the fear of myself — loving myself — is the most important thing i’ve learned. only with that knowledge did i start to understand how to love something more than myself (like an idea of god).
from religion i miss a deep exaltation of self. i miss a celebration of my existence and of our collective. i miss a framework for habitual curiosity and investigation of my own mind and experience. i crave a simple guide to my own infinity, not a tyrant to enslave me.—
—that said, i don’t hate religion. certainly, i favor curious exploration of personal spirituality, but i am only leery of blind adherence to tradition—to habit—without frequent re-evaluation. a constant re-commitment to being uncomfortable and encouraging yourself to incorporate new perspective.
why stop being curious about our own minds and mindlessly bow to the ancient word?
years of religious rebellion made me quick to judge those who still believed.
they can’t possibly be interesting. they haven’t thought enough if they still believe in this nonsense. we probably won’t get along. oh god, they’re crazy.
i’m 29 when i start to release judgement and accept devoutly religious people. i realize the value of religious stories now: they are guideposts for a journey through your own consciousness_-*-_»-«-—imploring you to understand death and agree with its terms, opening you up to life in infinity.
religious texts — and history—are brilliant tools when viewed as a recounting of some previous human experience: a journal entry in the diary of our species.
i still have yet to finish any religious text entirely, but i have found a certain peace in understanding their usefulness and an appreciation for those people who have found value in them.
for me, at this moment,
spirituality is an understanding, love, and embrace of your own existence—in all its messy glory—leading to the same of all things in reality.
let’s keep exploring what god means. let’s not stick to ideas created thousands of years ago because it’s easy and comfortable. the intimacy of spirituality requires us to endlessly question—our practices, our beliefs, our minds…
to base divinity (god) on history is, paradoxically, to base an absolute value on approximate knowledge
— albert camus
can you feel voraciously alive and also think that god stopped speaking to & through us thousands of years ago?
i can’t.
once i decided to wriggle free from the grip of expectation… as soon as i stopped dividing the world into muslim or not-muslim, beautiful or ugly, black or white, right or wrong … the world opened up to me! the love instantly(!) poured into my life—love i had been craving throughout my lonely college years.
of course i stumble upon some clichés because they came be to that way for a reason….
love did not come into my life until i started to love myself.
or so i thought…
turns out you can’t just have an epiphany and immediately become different. habits that took my entire 23 living years to build aren’t going to unravel overnight. and yet, the universe is so ready to give what i am ready to receive.
as my mind started to expand, as i started to prioritize love & devalue categorization, the brightest light of love entered my life.
ricky herbert (little bird) appeared and so began the journey to switch my focus from guilt, competition & comparison, one-upsmanship, achievement, control, and fear…to gratitude, self-love, curiosity, playfulness, improv, and celebration of all that is.
this uniquely graceful, ceaselessly receptive creature has shown me a powerful love: a devotion to fresh perspective. our time together has changed my mind so fundamentally, my entire view of reality is new: a vision of myself as a creator of graceful, theatrical wonder! a vision of a magical world!
willing and able to be vulnerable in most moments, intensely focused on seeing all the details of existence, burning to reach the edges of reality, he explores the endless possibilities of being alive…i can’t have anything but gratitude & awe for the time i’ve spent with him. my mind has been blown open and my heart is beating again——i’m no longer scared of its rhythm!
with his support, i finally turned my focus inward to explore what is naturally, not habitually me: infinite, fearless. i have been changing ever since. eight years have passed and i only now feel like i understand and love myself significantly….
my best self—the one i love the most—is bonkers and silly, just like you!
the courageous me is someone who doesn’t have rigid beliefs about love and intimacy, about appearances and gender: love is love is love (reality), no matter who it’s with, regardless of our fabricated classifications of morality, gender, age, religion, race.
life’s too short to be wary of a boy in a dress.
i knew that when i had a five-year-old love affair with our next door neighbor, nick. i knew that a year later when i kissed melissa, the first girl i ever loved.
from you i learned how to stick to my beliefs even when the world is offering me endless riches to abandon them. from you i learned how to own my masculinity with gentleness and grace. from you i learned determination. my god, you are determined. and hopeful! no matter what happens, the bottom of your barrel always seems to have one last drop of hope.
i was ecstatic, at ten, when i found out you were coming back home to live with us. i desperately wanted a guy to show me some of the ropes. some being who could show me how to love in a new & different way than mom did. i wanted another adult friend, someone to ask an endless string of whys and hows. someone to nerd out with. someone to show me the intricacies of marriage.
you were all that to me & more. you taught me about science, possibility, business, self-empowerment. you were godly in my eyes after your first ground-up business garnered a buyout offer upwards of $1 million. you made the world seem hospitable, exciting, full of promise—it was worth it.
i am forever grateful for that.
i’m so grateful for mom too, a tireless example of hope and perseverance: she taught me the strength to follow my heart despite dogma directing me to feel something that wasn’t mine. i could not have asked for a better parent to bring me up while you were away.
lebanon, 2002. i am fourteen when i fall in love for the second first time (isn’t every time the first?). i’m sure you remember her. aisha. the real warmth of love that witnesses you, that sees you and wants to see more, that offers you the comfort of a life recorded in the mind of another—self-perpetuation. compassionate to a fault, silly to her core, her laugh is addictive: absurdly loud, reaching into an ear-slapping high pitch, before diving down into a warm, easy chuckle… and praise the skies, she has the voice of an angel and loves to use it! i’ve never sang with anybody as much as i did with her.
she taught me that love was about so much more than physicality. it’s about music, rhythm, sharing energy, connecting for the sake of it, without ends. in fact we were never intimate, barely even a peck on the lips.
i’m still struggling today with this fear of human contact, i find myself terrified of being available and vulnerable with people, especially strangers and even those closest to me. i became massively repressed by this dogmatic denial of our carnal nature.
so my youth was dominated by over-defined boundaries with too little permission to explore without them. too much energy diverted to judgement. too much focus on identifying difference and either isolating from or violently eradicating it. eventually, i had to let go of those goals and refocus on accepting reality as it is.
embracing fear & riffing off the raw material.
at the root of all our machinations, all our spinning and twirling, fiddling and fumbling, jabbing and jerking, grinding and growling, fitzing and futzing…everything divisive finds its root in fear.
i am twenty seven. in the grips of my deepest, darkest depression and anxiety, i am afraid my heart is going to explode almost every night. i am afraid my eyes are going to burst. i am obsessed with the sharpness of knives. none of these feelings make sense to me. they are not me. i am terrified, confused and sad.
i am firmly in the vise of fear.
life is the paradox that we are all a little bit of everything, even the darkest things that we vilify in our cultures. the ultimate paradox is that we are completely alone and intensely together all at once. and we often sense this reality intuitively, but we hide from exploring it, believing it, because we are afraid of our own duplicitous “selves”.
yoga and meditation enter my life and i begin to focus my energy on breathing with rather than reacting to fear. it’s a remarkably simple idea: accept fear as a worthy adversary in the game of life, melt into the challenge, and you eliminate an enemy from your inner monologue. it’s a profound transformation of clarity: i found a life so much better than anything i had imagined. i found god: a fountain of youth!
there is magic, dad. magic is real!
i have experienced the infinity we are all always seeking: the fresh, exalted clarity of each moment experienced as if it is the first. it usually happens when i love myself and transcend binary by accepting & offering focus & love to everything that is presented to me, including fear—i deem it worthy and i build new perspectives. i build reality.
magic is love is fear is good is evil is youth is surrender is infinity is god is reality is perspective is focus
once i started routinely becoming aware of my fear and finding ways to meet it with intent, without expectation, i began to uncover myself: to simply witness myself, skip the judgment, and accept & riff off of whatever i’m serving. i saw the magic of believing (in ordered chaos & uncertainty).
each of us is the perfect example of ordered chaos. we are all divinely beautiful. and if i cannot comprehend what makes someone who and how they are, then they will be repulsive and ugly to me. even the most “wretched” beings, the ones who will do anything, take advantage of anyone, hurt anyone… are divinely beautiful in their very manifestation. the ordered chaos that makes them exist is undeniably gorgeous. because it’s the same source of existence for you and for me. (in other words, we both have the property of existing.)
this is god. this is love beyond duality. this is infinite celebration.
rationality is a tool; reality also exists beyond its rigid reach.
it’s 2016, my final year in corporate america. breathing into the fear of not having a job or a plan, i quit my cushy six-figure lifestyle in san francisco and set out on the road without either.
as i give myself time to explore and understand who i am, i learn loving kindness for myself, i learn how to grow compassion by offering that feeling to others.
as i give over to life in uncertainty, i begin to believe again. you know, the kind of belief you have when you’re a kid. the belief in the magic that seems to pervade everything in sight. agh! ai ai ai!! sweet mystery!
as i believe more and lean in to the love of fear & uncertainty, the flywheel spins and the world blossoms before me. actions done out of curiosity & love instead of fear & fear of fear always lead to the most magnificently beautiful ordered chaos!
everything is meaningless.
create the meaning you want.
and so, i choose to use my attraction to men to create the meaning “love” instead of “malfunction”. and now, i am the most whole i have ever been.
what do i value now?
awareness. (sillee) celebration. (sm)art.
an endless assertion that life is absurd—that love is the grounding power of focus—so why not poke and prod and play?!
also: the willingness to constantly question what is being sold to you. the perseverance to find out for yourself what is true. the compassion to believe that everything in reality is worthy. the strength to find a way to breathe in to all reality has to offer without rejection, without judgement, with enthusiasm. the wisdom to manage all of that and perform your unique perspective with beauty & grace, in a way that honors & celebrates your isness.
hey, now you know me better. ☺️
now you can see how i came to reject god, reject myself, then find both again in celebration. i only came to be who i am today, a wildly happy gay man—scratch that, a free & curious creature—because i gave up rigidity, gave up god, gave up categorization, rebelled against everything to understand myself and the reality i create.
i’m not man, i’m papaya!
can you see now that i don’t believe we have choice, that i did not choose to be gay, that i did not choose to renounce islam & god, that i did not choose to live for love, that i did not choose to hurt you by being proudly and loudly who i am?
i did not choose. i just am.
we are who we are so why not accept it?!
my wish for us now: let’s align with each other’s chaos.
let’s celebrate & talk about our perspectives. let’s learn about each other without expectations. let’s transcend tradition and keep our love alive even when it’s hard. let’s talk openly and endlessly…
i have some idea of how you feel after learning about my hidden life.
you feel guilty for letting me down, yourself down. ashamed that your dna has created something “defective”. wronged by the universe, by god, for your plight in having a child that doesn’t conform to social and religious norms, forcing you into hiding and shame. angry at me for “choosing” this path and causing you pain. disgusted with a lifestyle that you don’t truly understand and are afraid to explore. frustrated with life, frustrated that you have yet another “problem” to deal with, another challenge that isolates you, piling on the despair. devastated that your first son will never have the traditional life that you imagined for him, marriage, kids, grandkids… your dream dashed. betrayed that i hid from you all these years, that i couldn’t find the strength to talk to you about my feelings, that i left behind many of your teachings. alone. disconnected from your family, your own offspring, with no visible path to recourse.
guilty, ashamed, wrong(ed), angry, disgusted, frustrated, devastated, betrayed, alone.
feel them. love them. hate them. grow with them. squeeze them. poke them. step on them. they’re here for you. they are raw material. they are feeling. create art, paint, write, sing, manifest these feelings in the physical. but don’t stew. and don’t hide. you don’t want to stew or hide & create yourself into a reality of despair & victimhood. trust me, i know how this works, i know these feelings well after living with them most of my life…
and now i release them.
i know you will too.
i love you dad,
your son,
samer (bubbles)
