Please Stay
Most of us don’t leave because we don’t care—we leave because we can’t bear what we see.
For some reason, I’m thinking of Jillian this morning.
She calls me ‘Mariat’. She’s the only one who does, and I love it.
“Jilly wash Mariat’s hair?”
“Jilly massage Mariat’s shoulders?”
They feel like the most intimate invitations in the world and I miss them.
We’ve been friends for over a quarter of a century. I haven’t always been faithful to that friendship but every time I think of her, I feel the same tender love and wonder I felt the day we met.
The world has names for Jillian: intellectual disability, deep autism, extreme neurodivergence. But for a moment let’s disregard those monikers. They mean absolutely nothing to her. She has names for herself, names she understands, embodies and speaks into the world for anyone who cares to listen.
But how do we listen to someone who speaks not so much in words, but in presence and behaviour? How do we hear someone whose language is not our own?
There’s a line from a song I love:
“Listen with your eyes.”
Maybe that’s it.
Jillian doesn’t explain herself. She reveals herself and sometimes what she reveals is unbearable. Her meltdowns are raw, explosive, frightening— the kind of pain that fills a room and demands a response. Everything in you wants to step back. To manage it, to control it or simply to get away.
But what she asks—again and again—is this:
Stay. Keep watch.
That’s it. And most of us aren’t made for that, not with her, not even with ourselves.
Good Friday isn’t abstract to me this morning. I’m thinking of those who didn’t run, who stayed when everything in them must have been screaming to leave. No fixing, no explaining, no turning away, just staying in the presence of something they could not bear.
Jillian, like so many fellow ‘prophets of otherness’, has been asking that of us all along.
See me, not the behaviour, not the label.
ME.
See me and stay…
I can to be quick to draw conclusions and that tends to reduce what I see to something I already know and can manage. To be honest, even though I claim to live in possibility, I still like the world to stay predictable, easily named and contained.
Jillian refuses that. She is not containable. She lives in a small house, with 24/7 carers to keep her safe. She hates being “cared for,” loves being seen, and resists being caged in any way.
She remains UNTAMED.
It costs her. It costs everyone around her too but she will not surrender who she is to make the world more comfortable. I love her for that. I almost envy her courage and freedom. Jillian is truly and utterly herself.
And who is she? She’ll tell you.
Beautiful, Gorgeous.
That’s who!
I’ve seen her step out of the bath, pirouette in front of a mirror, arms stretched wide, and declare to herself and to the whole world - “Beautiful, Gorgeous.” No irony, no hesitation, just truth.
For years, she and I spoke together to students in schools and colleges all over Northern Ireland and beyond. She left no one in any doubt about who she really is or that they too, regardless of how they see themselves in the mirror, are simply … BEAUTIFUL, GORGEOUS - of course!
Little wonder she was once voted Queen of the Prom!
Stay.
Keep watch.
And slowly—almost imperceptibly—what once felt unbearable begins to reveal itself as something else entirely. Not something to fix, not something to fear, but something already whole, already known, already beautiful, already here and waiting for us.
Jillian’s birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year, Resurrection Day… Happy Birthday Jilly…
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