If you believe that someone like me hates you, you have a poor grasp of what “hate” is.
Hate is the opposite of love. Hate requires the same willingness to release as much as emotion and care as love does. And I suppose that it’s quite true for a number of fans and the response you have received. This event, that you entirely orchestrated, is truly traumatic for them, myself included. If you know so much about trauma, surely, you would know you can’t identify with our genuine pain, because each experience is unique. And you would know despite the misguided behavior of some, that it has nothing to do with you.
So why are you making it about you?
I am an actual survivor of sexual abuse, both in my early childhood and adolescence. Both of my biological parents abused me. It sucks. It’s painful. It has affected every aspect of my life and adulthood. Like your story, I didn’t fully grasp the scope of their damage until years after the abuse ended, in the midst of other upheavals in my life. I was 25 when it dawned on me, in full, that so many issues and problems tied back to my parents, and specifically: my mother. I’m writing a whole book about it! I’d be happy to send you a complimentary copy, especially if, as you say, this isn’t “about money.”
I’m not going to say that what I genuinely endured as a child and teenager means nothing if someone else didn’t have an experience that precisely mirrors mine. To be sure, you and I had rather different upbringings. A large portion of the abuse I experienced was the rarest type (mother-daughter) and hosts a whole different set of issues you can never understand as a straight, cisgender male. Likewise, if what you allege happened between you and Michael Jackson actually occurred, I could surely never understand the experience of a child enduring pressure from a beloved global celebrity.
But one thing remains true: my subconscious always knew that my abusers were bad people. I always knew to never trust them. My own parents! In my thirties, I’m only just now unraveling the tapestry and repairing the damage, years on after my father succumbed to lung cancer and almost five years without contact with my mother. I always distanced myself from them. Avoided their advances. Kept them at arms’ length. Never confided in them. My gaze always remained averted and I often ignored their phone calls. Something in me always knew the truth, and so did many people around us.
No, Wade, I don’t hate you or James. You wish I could.
I just pity you.
Someone like you who is so enmeshed in an identity that isn’t theirs that they have to hijack it from others. Who has so little knowledge of themselves as a person and fears who that person is inside, instead leeches on the status of others to advance themselves because they have no confidence to do it for themselves. Who thrives on the attention it brings them.
We have words for people like that. Words like narcissist and sociopath. There are several others, one of them probably suit you just fine.
You want our anger because it justifies your self-fulfilling prophecy as a victim. You certainly are a victim: of yourself, by your own design. Not of Michael Jackson. Devouring our anger and making it about you deflects the thinly-veiled hatred you have for yourself.
Part of the true healing from abuse is facing and forgiving yourself for the hatred that the abuse taught you to feel. It’s taking accountability for the wrongs you committed in your own life as a result of the dysfunction that was forced upon you because your own issues become survival strategies and coping mechanisms. Hurt people hurt others.
There’s no doubt in my mind that someone took advantage of you at some point in your life, no matter what they did, but it most certainly wasn’t Michael Jackson. And as long as you continue this charade, it will become more and more obvious. It’s the thing you fear the most and yet you are barreling headlong toward this certain ending because you know nothing else except self-destruction.
I’m telling my story, too. But I’m not doing it for the screentime, for royalties and licensing deals, to stand on someone else’s shoulders as they sink into the mud. I’m doing it on my own, for myself, and for others who need to know they aren’t alone. Unlike you, my story is making me lose money, a lot of it. I’ll be lucky to break even on it.
People like you drown out voices like mine. Exploiting our genuine pain, co-opting it, and acting it out like it’s just a matter of looking into a camera lens.
This will all boil down to one harsh truth in the end and you know it, and you will have learned nothing when it is all over, except that you can get a lot of attention for relatively little effort. And that’s why I just feel sorry for you: this episode will not heal you because this isn’t the actual damage that was done to you. And with all this narcissistic supply fulfilling your needs and taking up your time, you know you are too distracted to deal with the emptiness inside you.
You will never change, Wade. You don’t want to. When this train derails, you will board another without a second thought. Who’s next on your list? Britney?
Tell Me Twice 
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