Michael Jackson: ‘the man in the mirror’

By Diane Dennis

Boom!, Aug 4, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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Diane Dennis is a life transition coach appearing monthly on television’s “AM Northwest.” Contact her at 503-972-3441, Dianeden@centurytel.net or www.coachdianed.com.

He attracted enough scandalous gossip for the skeptical hairs on the back of my neck to bristle. After plastic surgery to the point of macabre and two child molestation lawsuits, I began to believe there was something terribly wrong with him.

Somewhere along the thread of his career, I stopped listening to his music and his voice. His larger-than-life escapades eclipsed those gifts. In my mind’s eye I created a story about this child/man, which I’d pieced together from media images, gossip rags and entertainment shows. I didn’t like him or dislike him. Rather, I was ambivalent with a heavy dose of concern for the excesses in his life. And then he died before he had a chance to age, or grow up.

Michael Jackson (1958-2009) lived his life in a “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” kind of way. He was thrown into an adult world as a child, singing and dancing his way through nightclubs, delivering lyrics about love and romance while cutting his teeth on television and gold records before his voice had a chance to change. As an adult he created a fantasy world called Neverland, dressed like a Nutcracker, wore one white glove and carried around his pet chimp Bubbles. He played with and entertained children, no doubt a reflection of his inner psyche and an attempt to relive a childhood never actualized.

After he died, the media turned up the volume on his songs, and I listened with a different ear. Gone were the eccentric lifestyle, the odd-looking face–neither man or boy, white or black – and I heard the sweet melody and the tender thought-provoking lyrics, and I cried. Not only for him, for us – for how we spend our time and energy. While we focus on “him” or the “other,” we snicker, judge, disdain, complain,and all but ignore the biggest influence we have in this lifetime –ourselves.

The irony is that he wrote about and challenged us to value equality, sharing, giving, caring, and then created a life that seduced us into becoming his peeping Toms and cynics.

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