To Jared and... his Jaredness
To Jared and... his Jaredness
A birthday message from Axy @Aaaahhhxy
Back then, I was a random “Arrow” fan who laughed her socks off on one of those Instagram pictures of him and Stephen Amell. They were messing around. Jared seemed like he was a nice guy. I hit the follow bar and never regretted it.
No, I wasn't acquainted with “Supernatural.” Which was strange, all things considered. I was barely old enough to understand it when “X-Files” first changed the television landscape, but I fell for it nonetheless.
My dad and I would spend entire nights voraciously devouring entire seasons, back when they were released in VHS form and we had to buy the imported versions from stores that have ceased to exist a long time ago. Now that I think about it… Papa and I probably invented binge-watching in the early ’90s.
The television format would become a best friend of mine for the troubling years to come, providing me with a safe harbor while navigating the hard and often unfair world around me.
Oh, I knew of “Supernatural.”
I just didn’t think it was something for me.
Not even when I added Jared to the thin, very thin, list of people I decided would star in my Instagram timeline.
Strangely enough, it took me almost another year to follow Jensen. And nothing rational could explain that, since I knew and loved him for a long, long time already, having been a fan of “Dark Angel” since day one. Inexplicably, it was about Jared on his own before it was about anyone else.
I’m one of those people who thrive on fandoms. Whenever life gets difficult to handle, on various degrees, artists of all kinds have been a refuge for me. Musicians. Writers. Actors. Directors. Fame never remotely attracted me, but the capacity to tell stories…That, for me, always was the best and most interested side of life. The one I could really lose myself into. Creators were of a paramount importance in my troubled, depression-ridden existence.
However, one after the other, my idols let me down. Youth can’t tolerate that humanity is flawed, and kept them all on pedestals, like perfect porcelain dolls that couldn’t possibly deface their own selves with blemishes. Vilified in my own home because of my imperfections, that flawlessness was, by definition, impossible was everything but something I could allow.
The thing with pedestals is… they break.
And when they do, they don’t just crack.
They shatter.
Before I even knew how, I was stabbed in the heart by crystal shards.
Repeatedly.
***
Twelve months ago, “Supernatural” became a part of my life unexpectedly.
Actually, scratch that. “Supernatural” took over my whole existence within days. It was mind-bending to finally find a place that would accurately assess and consider each and every one of my obsessions, both on a fictional level, and on a human one. Angels. Demons. Death, however impermanent it thankfully is for the Winchesters.
Mistakes, and how to overcome them, even when they’re unleashing the apocalypse and came short of ending the world.
Sam Winchester quickly found his way to my heart. They all did, but Sam had something more I wasn’t able to identify at first.
And then it became painfully clear.
His flaws.
His flaws made me fall in love with him.
I don’t really believe in destiny. However, I do believe that some things are meant to be, but whether they will happen is entirely up to us.
I could have spent a long, long, long time ignoring “Supernatural.” I could have spent a lifetime without ever crossing paths with it, and deciding that my road would run on a narrow parallel to theirs, instead of miles and miles and miles away from it.
But the second I was there… I just knew that no other place or space in the world would ever feel half as good as this one does.
For a show called “Supernatural,” there was something inherently natural in my brand new sense of belonging. Everything was exactly as seen through a magnifying glass: bigger, better, bolder, smarter and far, far more touching and heart-wrenching than anything I’d ever known.
I’ve always been quite the crier, but there, I cried actual, physical buckets of tears. Not the bad type. Rather, the cathartic one. I was stuck in a deep, dark hole, and the Winchesters and their angel got me out of it in no time.
Sam did most of the job, though.
When I have a visceral relationship to fictional characters, I tend to be extremely hard on them and not to forgive when they mess up. I did the exact opposite with Sam. Every single mistake, every bad turn and wrong choice, every time he acted in a way that broke my heart made me love him more.
Sam Winchester taught me that loving someone’s flaws is, actually, the only way to truly love them.
He never shied away from his faults. Not once, regardless to the personal cost of fixing it all.
At a time where I was at my most fragile and unforgiving towards myself, this came as one of the most important revelations of my entire existence.
I was happy with my love for Sam.
I really didn’t need Jared to mess it up, one way or another.
And I was genuinely concerned that the fun and smart dude that appeared regularly on my Instagram timeline wouldn’t live up to Sam. Can I love the character and decide to keep the actor away from me? Was that even a possibility?
Chances are, I have ostrich DNA. I’m unbelievably good at sticking my head into the sand as a way to pretend I don’t see the things I’m not ready to accept, or I’d rather ignore. I could easily pretend that the AKF movement totally escaped me and that I genuinely had no idea it existed. Or that it was Jared’s to begin with.
Truth is, I didn’t. I knew. But I was a long, long, long way away from being ready to talk about my own issues, so, I overlooked it and shrugged it off. I thought, back then, that it was the utmost of shame. Admitting you have a problem, and that this problem is inside of your head.
I’ve always considered that feeling physically unable to get out of my bed was a sign of weakness, or so I’d been told. I’d been told that feeling a rush to put an end to my own life was a crime too terrible to be named. I lived with the guilt of being too damaged to be loved for such a long time, dodging in actual terror any form of constructive thought to make it change.
At times, my demons posed as my closest friends.
It’s no wonder I found so much of myself in Sam.
But, paradoxically, inviting Jared to become a little more than that dude on Instagram was taking a major, immense risk. Who knew what I’d find if my head finally popped out of the sand?
Coincidentally -- or not, after all -- I decided to take one step away from Sam and toward Jared about the same time my body started to fail me.
I’ve always considered that the real traitor was my mind. The irony was unbearable when, days within the first real hints of a long-term mental relief, I fell prey to debilitating pain radiating from my left side and making the act of thinking impossible to pursue.
I couldn’t walk. Going to the other side of the flat was a marathon I would dread hours ahead. Focusing on anything other than keeping myself alive was something I couldn’t afford anymore.
If anything, this was the worst possible time to handle Jared and his… Jaredness.
It’s the one I picked anyway.
One morning, almost accidentally, my Amazon account downloaded a digital copy of “Family Don’t End With Blood” on its own. I wanted to claim a refund… But I started to read it and fell rapidly down the rabbit hole.
And what a glorious hole it was. For the few hours needed to read it all, the pain a trip to the ER and three different doctors weren’t able to control or identify calmed down and almost vanished.
Once again, it was hard not to read anything into it.
To say that it shook me to my core would be the understatement of the century. Three times over my study of the last 50 pages, I had to physically detach myself from my Kindle because I was terrified by what I was reading.
Never, ever in my life had someone been more capable of describing the mess inside of my head.
Never, ever in my life had someone been more capable of fully grasping the level of despair it takes to be one step away from crossing a line.
Never, ever in my life had someone been more capable of accurately qualifying the helplessness of it all.
To my greatest shock, I understood that however strong my bond with Sam was, the one I was already building with Jared would be a million times stronger.
In hindsight, it was probably a billion times rather than a single million.
Because of my pierced heart, I was extremely careful when I started to dig a little further into the dude from Instagram. You, my dear, won’t get any access to anything remotely resembling a pedestal.
Turns out, he doesn’t need anything like that.
He’s imperfect and, to my greatest surprise, it would be yet another important piece of wisdom for me. That there’s nothing more rewarding than loving flawed people.
Nobody can make me laugh the way he does. His sense of humor, although sometimes a little misunderstood, is very much like mine.
Nobody can stimulate my brain the way he does. He has a curiosity and a way to assess the world that I find inspiring, and that helped me shift mine to a far less judging and far more loving way.
Nobody can reassure me about my own emotions the way he does. He doesn’t cheat with his own. He’s an open book, and it doesn’t disrupt his capacity to give. I thought those two notions were completely opposite, or so I’d been lead to believe.
Nobody can move me to tears the way he does when he’s talking about that thing that connected us in the first place, and his candor is always, always sparking a conversation with myself I couldn’t bear to have before him.
Very few people have the importance he has, on this side of the spectrum, because he’s just himself, and there’s nothing I feel like rejecting in who he is. The things I might dislike or not entirely agree with, I forgive. Because on the whole, he’s earned that forgiveness. I love him because he is not perfect, and it would be senseless to crucify him when he proves me right.
I’m not big on celebrating birthdays. I forget everyone’s, I forget my friend’s, I even forget mine on a regular basis. And yet, today’s an important one.
A year ago, July 19 wouldn’t have meant much for me. It would take seven more days until “Supernatural” and I finally agreed to go on a date. And then eloped to Vegas on the same night.
But it does, this year. It means a whole lot.
Had it not been for Jared, I doubt I would be who I am today. Jury’s still out about whether I would have made it at all. Over the course of 12 months, he was the principal argument in me going through my darkest battle with depression -- or rather, Sam was -- and he somehow accompanied me when doctors finally found out what was wrong with me and it was far, far, far worse than anything I would have anticipated. For weeks, merely staying alive was uncertain, and it felt like walking on a thinning line that could go both ways.
Turns out, there’s a fighter in me.
Turns out, my mother was wrong when she force-fed me the notion that I was the weakest of all links.
Turns out, with the right spark, I’m capable of far more than I ever thought I had the fire to achieve.
All it took was a special kind of light.
Jared’s, and all his… Jaredness.
Things have changed on every possible scale, on the eve of my first year inside of the most amazing, frustrating, maddening, joyful, terrifying, and overly beautiful family ever. I have changed, my world has changed, the way I see who I am has changed, too…For the better. It’s not easier, but it’s worth the effort.
I was lucky enough to test my ever-growing love for him up close and personal at my first convention. To say that I was concerned would be a lie. I wasn’t. I was more… terrified. Scared beyond reasonable measure.
There’s nothing more unforgiving than meeting your heroes, and I’m extremely well-placed to know that all of the previous pedestals broke on those very occasions. So, sure, Jared wasn’t exactly high enough (pun unintended) to hurt me should he fall, but there’s no telling how people might break your heart, willingly or not.
It took him about 12 seconds to convince me that I was, indeed, far from his truth. Previous experiences proved my expectations to be extremely low… Or rather, he overpassed them all with flying colors at the speed of light.
It taught me that flawed people can also be exceptional in their unwavering faith in us and will to share and to make our experience better than we could possibly dream of. I didn’t expect to connect with him so soon. I was ready to give it a few conventions for something to happen.
He had a different opinion on the matter.
Living under the flagship of “Supernatural” is a chance. It’s a joy. A treasure. A home where I get to be myself fully, entirely, unapologetically. A family I would abandon anything for if they needed me to. The best place in the world, possibly even in the universe. I’ve never been so happy, so creative, so intellectually stimulated, so challenged and rewarded greatly upon overcoming it.
But living under Jared’s is an even better experience. Challenges are twice as hard, and the rewards are twice as big. There’s a part of dark in that experience, but that’s precisely what allows me to enjoy the light, and in his case, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I’ve never been so grateful in my whole 33-something years of existence.
Happy Birthday, dear Jared.
Turns out, following that dude on Instagram three years ago wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
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