A Michael Jackson fan recently opened up about her beliefs in a Facebook post.
For most of her life, she believed what the media told her. That Michael Jackson was dangerous. That the allegations were real. That the strange, pale figure in the tabloids was someone to be suspicious of rather than understood.
Then she watched the Michael Jackson movie.
Everything she thought she knew collapsed in the space of a few hours. The man she had been conditioned to fear turned out to be someone who had been failed by almost everyone around him.
SHE FELL INTO HIS STORY SO DEEPLY THAT SHE COULD NOT FIND HER WAY BACK OUT.
Why Michael Jackson fans feel grief this deeply
She stopped eating. Her body started aching. She described feeling too emotionally drained to even cry. The grief was not for someone she had ever met. It was for someone she finally understood, too late to tell him.
At 23, she made an appointment with a psychiatrist to deal with the heaviness that came from understanding Michael Jackson’s tragic reality.
She sat down with a professional and tried to explain the weight she was carrying. She told him about Michael and the injustice he suffered. About the pain she felt after learning about his life and forming a deep connection with him.
THE PSYCHIATRIST LAUGHED.
He told her Michael Jackson was not even handsome enough for this level of obsession. He called her feelings childish. He dismissed the entire community of people who shared her grief as a social media exaggeration.
The emotional toll of discovering Michael Jackson’s real story
Then he prescribed medication for delusions and hallucinations and told her to put her phone down and focus on her studies.
HIS FINAL WORDS BEFORE SHE WALKED OUT WITHOUT BUYING THE MEDICATION?
MICHAEL JACKSON IS JUST A SKELETON NOW.
She left feeling worse than when she arrived. Not because her feelings were disproportionate, but because a trained professional had just confirmed what the media had always done to Michael Jackson fans. Tell them what they feel is not real.
REALITY CHECK!
When someone spends years believing a lie about a person and then discovers the truth, the grief is doubled. You mourn the person. And you mourn every year you spent on the wrong side of the story.
That is not a delusion. That is a conscience catching up with reality, and something the psychiatrist was completely devoid of.