He was the King of Pop, a global icon whose every move made headlines, whose music defined a generation. For millions, Michael Jackson lived a “magical” life—a dazzling existence of world tours, rabid fans, and unparalleled success. But behind the gates of his dreamlike Neverland Ranch, the man behind the sequined glove lived a different, often painful, reality. In a series of candid interviews, Jackson pulled back the curtain on his life, revealing that the price of being the most famous person in the world was, quite simply, his humanity.

“I don’t think people understand the downside that comes with it,” Jackson once confessed, his voice soft, almost hesitant. “They’re so quick to call you weird and eccentric, but it’s almost as if you’re forced to be different because it’s not normal.” This was the central paradox of his life: an existence that was anything but normal. From the start, as a child star in the Jackson 5, his life was “a scene of chaos.” “We couldn’t go to the mall or anything,” he recalled. The “fun” they had was limited to pillow fights in hotel rooms, long after the crowds had dispersed.

As his solo career exploded into a global phenomenon, this isolation became more entrenched. The world he could access shrank until it was almost nonexistent. Simple, mundane freedoms that billions of people take for granted were unattainable luxuries for him. “I can’t go to the park. I can’t go to Disneyland as myself. I can’t go out and walk down the street,” he declared, matter-of-factly. “There are just crowds and cars stuck in traffic.”

His deep longing for normalcy became a recurring, heartbreaking theme. He spoke with genuine longing for the most ordinary of tasks: “I want to go to the market… and pick up a cart, put some food in it and walk down the aisles. I would love to do that.” But he couldn’t. “Of course not,” he added with a resigned laugh. “I tried, and… the whole place stopped. People chanting and asking for autographs… it didn’t work.”

The inability to engage with the real world forced Jackson to build a simulation of it. “I created my world behind the gates,” he explained. “Everything I loved was behind those gates.” This was the genesis of Neverland, a sprawling ranch complete with an amusement park and a zoo. It was more than just a wealthy man’s extravagance; it was a desperate attempt to reclaim the childhood he never had and to create a “safe” space where he could “let loose and be free.” Because the moment he stepped outside, he was no longer a person. He was property.

Even a simple night out, a luxury any other 20-something might enjoy, was out of the question. “I’ll go to a nightclub,” he would think, only to find the experience instantly distorted by his presence. “When I go to places like that, it becomes… work instead of fun,” he says. “They announce over the loudspeaker that I’m there, and they play all my records, and I sign autographs… as soon as you walk in, every song is mine… people start chanting for me to dance. So it becomes a performance all over again.”

To get even “a little sense” of the real world, Jackson had to resort to elaborate measures. “I had amazing disguises,” he admitted. “I could fool my mother.” He relished these moments of anonymity, not for any shady reasons, but for the opportunity to simply observe. He wanted to “see life for what it really was,” to learn “what people talked about when they just happened to be talking.” The moment people recognized him, “the conversation changed,” and it became all about him.

In one of his most telling and bizarre anecdotes, Jackson described a dream he had about going shopping in a supermarket. A good friend of his, a mall owner, arranged an extraordinary play. “He shut down the entire mall,” Jackson recounted. Then the friend “put people I knew in there, pretending they were shopping… they planned everything, even the music… it gave me a chance to see, in my way, what the real world was like.” It was a staged, artificial event, but it was the closest thing he could get to reality.

This profound isolation fostered a “painful” loneliness. The admiration of millions, he explained, was a strange and distant thing. He described the surreal experience of being in a hotel room, “often alone,” while “thousands of fans” camped outside, “screaming because they love you.” “You can’t go out. You feel trapped inside,” he said. “There’s all this love out there, but… you really feel trapped.” He confessed to “wandering the streets looking for people to talk to,” a specter that haunted his own life.

Adding to this loneliness was the relentless, crushing weight of the media. Jackson felt like a perpetual “target.” “The bigger the star, the bigger the target,” he explained. He described a life of “running and hiding” from the “paparazzi.” “You can’t go that way because they’re over there. Go this way… I mean, I’ve traveled all over the world dealing with running and hiding.”

He wasn’t just hounded; in his view, he was misrepresented. He felt the “tabloids” had created a caricature of him, a “Wacko Jacko” character built on “crazy stories” that were “so far from the truth.” “It hurts to be misunderstood,” he said, his frustration palpable. “No matter how hard you try to get people on the right track, there’s going to be some judgment… just because it’s printed, doesn’t mean it’s true.” He saw it as a “Eat-Alive Hysteria,” a way for news outlets to “cash this out” at his expense.

He felt trapped in a situation with no way out. “No matter what you do,” he lamented, “there’s always someone who’s going to say something… no matter how good your intentions are, there’s always some idiot… trying to bring you down. And all you want to do is bring a little love and joy.”

This disconnect—between his intentions and public perception, between his desire for connection and his forced isolation—has shaped his struggles. He remains deeply aware of his own humanity, even as the world tries to deify him. “I see myself very much like you… I’m human, just like you,” he insists. “I’m not better than you… I have no right to think I’m better than you or to have an ego that can get in the clouds.” He has seen other stars “fall” because they began to “mistreat the people who helped them and… forget where they came from.”

Michael Jackson never forgot where he came from. In many ways, he was still a boy from Gary, Indiana, forever trapped inside the monolithic brand of “King of Pop.” He was a man who could win the love of millions on stage but couldn’t find a single casual interaction in a grocery store. He reached a level of fame that might be the ultimate dream of the modern world, only to find it a gilded cage. He had the world at his feet, but all he really wanted was to set foot on the tiled floor of a supermarket aisle.