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Meet Michael: Finding Self in the Mirror. Life-Purpose: To personify intuitive creativity and change more than minds through work contributions. Evokateur changes futures. Evokateur / Evokateur / Evokateur Profile boss: Evokateur

"I am so damned different, and I can't help that. And today, I don't WANT to help that." Michael doesn't live on our world, and he knows it. As a pure Evokateur, he's familiar with every synonym for different that Roget has to offer. Strange. Weird. Bizarre. Odd. Striking. Unusual. The differences go as far back as Michael's memory. A dreamer, a creator, a born artist, Michael has always lived in Evokateur-world, never spending more time than necessary in the world the rest of us know, a world much more dull, and much less kind, than the world that lives within him. A "square peg in a round hole world," he didn't mesh with the accepted, logical practices of kindergarten. Learning logical and predictable rules for things, like lining-up, bored the budding Evokateur tyke and he remembers the consequences of his unintentional inability to conform.

"There was my kindergarten teacher writing and calling my mom to tell her that I was a problem, there was something wrong with me, I was always dreaming..."

The strictures of cookie-cutter academia got tighter, and during his fifth-grade year, he reached an important turning point.

"In the fifth grade, I had a teacher who absolutely hated me. She would try to punish me for my daydreaming. She put me out in the hallway for awhile, or she'd give me a row of my own in the corner with my desk. The problem was, that was perfect for me!"

Though the enforced isolation was a blessing in disguise for Michael, a loner from earliest ages, he got his teacher's message loud and clear. He was broken. Something was wrong with the real Michael, so he began an almost lifelong quest to play their game, to fit in, to go underground with his true Self and hope no one figured out Who and What he was hiding.

The hiding continued throughout an unhappy early adult life, moving through jobs that ranged from unfulfilling to agonizing, pursued fiercely and always by this nagging, painful sensation of being wrong, being broken, wanting and wishing to be fixed, to be like everybody else.

With the onset of middle age, a day of reckoning came when the hiding wasn't acceptable anymore. Michael set out on a mission to find the Truth about himSelf and his "different-ness."

"I decided, I'm going to fix myself until I'm 'normal' and no longer 'broken', or I will somehow find out that I am not broken, and I don't need to be fixed, and it's okay to be the way I am."

Books written for intuitive, creative people were the first stops on his journey. The Artist's Way, a book that addresses the spirituality of creating, helped him see that he wasn't the only one who felt bound and gagged by the logical world in which he found himSelf an intuitive, emotional person, and that he wasn't the only one struggling. One night he stumbled across the Ansir Web site, and found something surprising when he read his results.

"I couldn't stop laughing. I was saying, This is Me! It was like, did somebody look at my life, did somebody get inside my brain? Oh my God! Maybe I'm not broken. There must be other people out there like me! In that crystal clear moment of realization, I found what I'd been looking for. It was a major turning point to find that I wasn't broken, that I really was okay. I didn't need to be fixed."

The confidence he gained from finding a place where his profound creativity was affirmed as a gift made an enormous difference in Michael's life.

"The biggest thing it's done, is that I've stopped trying to be other things. I've stopped trying to wear a logical mask and fit into a logical world. I REALLY tried...I had jobs where I had to wear a suit! I wanted so badly to fit into the world, to be a 'success' on those terms...but I always failed because I could go so far in their world, but no farther. Ansir showed me that I'm not broken, so I'm not trying to fix me anymore. I'm not broken. I'm not fixed. I'm okay. I'm me."

In the afterglow of his moment of self-acceptance, Michael has found a new level of happiness. He's also found a new level of success in his career as a writer, including a book on drumming, a lifelong passion, which will be released next year. He's accepted that his need for solitude is a deep part of his identity, and fills that need by staying up later each night than the rest of his family. An active member of the Ansir Community, he lends an ear to other "differentOnes", helping them understand the rewards of self-acceptance.

After years of searching for a "fix" to his "brokenness", Michael found what he was looking for. Ansir pointed him to the mirror, where he found the beauty of himSelf, the only "fix" this EvokateurOne has ever needed.
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