After a few too many late nights out, many people in the gay community begin to feel that they are ready for a new routine. Within the course of a year, I went from being lost in a college daze to feeding orphanages one pair of yoga pants at a time. This story is about how I woke up and moved on.
{Guest Post by Johnathon Brodeur, Founder of Urban Unbound}
We’re Pent Up
Homosexuality in Midwestern suburbia…what a drag.
Closed minds, Catholic school, and no other level-headed gay people in sight.
Come out of the closet? Why bother? So that grandma could bring it up at the next family dinner? No thank you.
Those were my teen years and they were the teen years of many other gay people. Waiting, hoping, praying that someday life may be a little bit more exhilarating.
We’re Let Loose
And then what happens? College. Ah, college. All those years of pent up sexuality have a place to shine. Quickly, I am out to my new group of open-minded, accepting friends. They love that I’m gay. It’s, like, so progressive. Within a few days, I have a few gay friends. Within a few weeks, I find that I am in fact in “the gay community.”
What a beautiful thing! A community of people just like me. What better to do than celebrate? And where better to celebrate than a gay club, the mecca made for our community?
Rally the troops. Pop some bottles. And let’s head out. There is fun to be had.
The next day: We’re still gay! Let’s do it again! And again…and again.
The Party Is Ending
Now let’s survey the situation a little later.
The party has been dragging on for a while now. Drinking, going out, and mingling has shifted from a celebration into a habit that has lost its luster. The friendships forged around our shared gayness are fading away. The gay community that seemed like the perfect niche to be in has left many of us in disarray as we must now decide whether to cling to the fun that we were having or to move on into the next steps of our lives. Essentially, we must make the decision: party on or move on.
Here are problems I had with life in the gay scene that encouraged me to move on:
We can become spoiled.
This is not just a gay issue, but a tech issue. Siri can answer any question you have almost immediately. Instagram can loop us into mindless hours of scrolling through visual stimuli. Grindr can bring you anything from a hookup to a boyfriend without needing to even leave your room.
We can have it all…but not really. Everything worth having, including relationships, takes time, sacrifice, and effort. In the tech illusion, it is easy to forget that we need to truly invest in the relationships from which we hope to benefit. Dealing with the baggage of apps like Grindr, whether personally or in a relationship, can be really disappointing and draining.
We can become shallow.
We get used to window-shopping with apps like Grindr as we are able to sort and filter people based on a few characteristics that we see. We can do the same thing in a quick walk around a club. It is all too easy to apply the swipe-left mentality when meeting people in the real world, looking for jobs, or making any important life decisions. Everything and everyone has its pros and cons. It takes some hardship and disappointment to understand that we usually can’t have it all. The gay community usually doesn’t choose places to congregate where this reality can be accepted.
We can lose our sense of self.
Clubs, mistakes, gossip, etc. The lifestyle can be fun and entertaining. But it often isn’t deep and it rarely makes us feel better about ourselves. If we undergo the shift from having fun once in a while to being fully in the gay scene, it may take a toll on our subconscious. We are destined to ask ourselves from time to time what we are living for. When we live for the night, we live in the dark.
The gay community can be vibrant, lively, and accepting at its best. At its worst, it can be a disconnected place where our dreams and our self-worth can distort or atrophy.
Move On…to What?
We may realize that we have outlived our party days. But we may not really know what to do next. This transition can be really rough. After feeling empty or numb from too many nights out, we often want to find a deeper life purpose. It helps to have support during this sort of time. However, the relationships we have invested in may threaten to pull us back into old habits rather than to help us grow. This period of transition can be lonely and confusing. Here is some advice to help reroute your life journey more comfortably.
A Few Tips
Find friends who can help you give.
We take when we are in party mode – spending money on ourselves, often using alcohol or drugs, and prioritizing entertainment. Maturing is about finding ways to give rather than to take – in work, volunteering, and contributing to our friendships and communities. Giving is more likely to make us truly happy when the party is over and we feel like growing up. Chances are that a few of your old friends are evolving in a similar way to yourself and are ready to start giving back. Those are the friends with whom to keep in contact.
After I graduated college, I went to Thailand to teach English and volunteer on a permaculture farm. (Permaculture is a natural and sustainable way to grow organic food.) This experience forced me to focus on people other than myself, which ultimately helped me realize how I could serve the world.
I went on to start a yoga apparel company, Urban Unbound, which employs and empowers the Thai artisans I met. My company also finances orphanages that want to become self-sufficient by growing their own food with permaculture. By breaking away from my college party habits and bringing people into my life who can help me give, I am happier in a much deeper way than when I was in college.
Ground yourself.
Life gets rocky. When the world around us becomes unstable, the importance of having inner stability becomes clear. We can ground ourselves by holding some sort of routine or mentality that we will keep through the good times and the bad. It can be a spiritual or religious practice, an exercise routine, or just a life philosophy or mantra that works for us in any occasion.
Personally, I found meditating and doing yoga helpful in the process of transforming my life. I did a Vipassana meditation retreat, which cued an enormous turning point in my life (learn more about these retreats at dhamma.org). When I encounter failures while growing my business, when I struggle with building the network I want to carry into my next chapter of life, I always have my yoga and meditation practice to fall back on. These practices don’t only give me a sense of consistency in changing times, but they help me realize that whatever happens, I’ll be okay. While I don’t have fun like I did partying in college, I do have a sense of peace like I have never before known.
Empower your Heart.
Our life purposes will unfold when we give our hearts freedom and keep the power of our minds in check. Our hearts just want to love. When we use our minds to facilitate the ability of our hearts to love, we begin to live in a beautiful wave of happiness and connectedness.
I studied finance and was primed to get a corporate job. I induced a lot of stress upon myself trying to convince my heart to desire a corporate career. It wasn’t healthy and it didn’t work. When I listened to my heart, I was taken on a journey across the world – first following my heart’s desire to teach kids in need, then to empower the artisans I befriended, and finally to help orphans feed themselves and reforest our environment. It has been a journey of love so much more fulfilling than the journey upon which my logical mind or my desire to take could have led me.
To Sum Up
Partying is fun. A lot of us need to have fun for a while and get it out of our systems. The important part is to know when your fun has been had and you are ready to move. The positive emotion after fun is peace and it is so much richer. To begin your journey with peace: Be open to the right groups of people. Be open to opportunities to make mature decisions. Silence your mind so you can hear your heart.
Johnathon Brodeur graduated from the University of Tampa in 2014 with a degree in Finance. In efforts to keep his soul from being eaten by corporate America, he went to Thailand to teach English. He now runs a tribal and yoga apparel company, UrbanUnbound.com. Not only does Urban Unbound employ and empower Thai artisans, but it also donates 50% of its net profit to empower orphanages in developing countries to become self-sufficient and sustainable with permaculture.
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