When Healing Shows Up
More than 20 years ago, I somehow became aware of a teenager on General Hospital.
I was not watching the show and hadn’t in years, but somehow I knew this kid’s name, I knew he was a musician in real life, and I was aware of the storyline he was a part of involving young girl who had been raped.
I have no earthly idea how or why I knew who he was ... I hadn’t actually seen the storyline, nor did I ever see any of the movies he did, even though I remember wanting to see them because he was in them.
He showed up on the periphery of my awareness occasionally over the next several years, and I was just always struck by his presence.
Then just over a decade ago, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I looked up that storyline he had done as a teenager, and it was a turning point in my life.
I had never encountered such a powerfully healing presence as the one I met through the screen in those moments.
It was a presence I could physically feel.
For the first time, I began to wonder if the things my mother had taught me about men - well, about straight men, thank God she loved the gays - might not be true.
She had taught me in no uncertain terms that men don’t love.
She taught me that any love I saw in men was a lie, or simply a means to an end.
What I saw and felt through the screen flew in the face of all of that.
Of course, she was also sure to include that I might see love in TV or movies, but that it was also a lie; a story created to ruin our lives with unrealistic expectations.
She was thorough in schooling me on this point that I would never, ever be loved, because that love simply didn’t exist.
And even if it did exist for some people, you had to be thin and beautiful (because again, men don’t truly love and only want one thing), so there was just no way I was ever going to be loved.
So.
A year or so after I watched that storyline, Jonathan Jackson went back to General Hospital, now as an adult, and I picked up watching it.
I found the same presence that had been so deeply healing for me, as the depth of his heart played out on the screen.
One day, his character left for Ireland, not to be seen again.
Until he showed up in Nashville.
After embodying a love and kindness my mother had systematically taught me did not exist from men - creating the slightest crack in my lifelong belief in the truth of her words - this man who was the first ray of the light of love that was ever bright enough to shine through my shattered filters, literally moved from Hollywood to my city, and became a person I actually know.
Whose life unfolds this way?!
As I unraveled my mother’s lessons that love only exists in stories, I felt in the music of his band Enation - his real life words from his real life heart - the very same light of love. I came to know that his real story bears a striking resemblance to the one that played out on the screen all those years ago.
I have felt in real life person that same healing presence I felt through the screen ... With the added unimaginable gift of being known by name every time I see him.
I would never have fathomed such thing was possible.
With my two favorite members of Enation, Jonathan and his brother Richard Lee Jackson
After Jonathan and his brother Richard moved to town and laid the foundation for my healing journey - two souls from the opposite end of every spectrum from me, by the way - I was offered a church gig I would absolutely have turned down six months earlier.
Thanks to the tiniest shift in my perceptions created by the depth of love Jonathan and Richard embody and ascribe to their faith, I said yes to that gig.
Thanks to that yes, I was there the morning of December 22, 2013 when Matthew Perryman Jones showed up to sing.
While Jonathan and Richard were the first rays of the light of love that were ever bright enough to shine through my shattered filters, Matthew brought the full depth of its truth.
The moments they showed up clearly divided my life into before and after, and they truly are the most profound gifts I’ve ever received.
One of my all-time favorite photos, with Matthew and my best friend Brandon.
A couple of years ago, I was writing up this story, and went to look for a video of the storyline Jonathan had been in as a teenager. I just typed in the two character names, and clicked on this video first, because the photo embodies the feeling that was so powerful for me.
I was stunned to discover that it was a compilation of that storyline someone had put together, set to a song from the completely amazing - but decidedly not that famous - Matthew Perryman Jones.
Are you kidding me right now?!
It makes me weep to this day.
The song is also a pretty stunning expression of the space someone occupies for me; I have indeed been living with his ghost for nearly 5 years, and want absolutely no one else.
So many beautiful gifts have come from simply writing my story here.
This work of healing is hard and slow and tearful and lonely and completely miraculous.
Our lives are 100% what’s happening inside us.
While I have loved this man I love with every cell of my being from the moment he showed up, I promise you had I not first done this work of healing, I would’ve destroyed any relationship I attempted to have.
I know this, because I destroyed every relationship I ever attempted to have, most before they even began.
I also would have shattered him in the process, the way I was shattered by those who tried to love me from their deep brokenness.
As so many of us are - particularly when we grew up being controlled rather than loved and taught that we were responsible for others rather than ourselves - I was walking in the world with a gaping hole in the center of me.
We cannot love when we are not whole from the inside out.
I would never have been able to love anyone without doing this work.
I am grateful beyond words that I began this journey completely by accident in March of 2014, when one of Matthew’s lines snapped my deepest wound into clear focus and I randomly wrote a Facebook post about it.
I’ve come to know that this work of healing, and the deep truth that flows from it, is why I am on this planet.
Along with the gifts they’ve given me, the years I’ve spent healing my own heart have given me the gift of sitting with friends in crisis and knowing exactly what to say.
How to speak life into them and remind them of their brilliant light, rather than offering shattering and unhelpful advice that only serves to tell them that what’s inside them isn’t enough.
How to focus on loving them, rather than throwing fuel on fires of conflict that only perpetuate brokenness and make healing and walking forward infinitely harder.
It’s so powerful coming to know from the inside out what we need in our pain.
As Miles Adcox so often says, the best way we can help others heal is to get a Ph.D. in ourselves.
Truer words have rarely been spoken.
The work of getting that Ph.D. is hard.
I shed tears every day.
Every. Single. Day.