Meet the Chicago man going viral for telling strangers they are loved
Meet the Chicago man going viral for telling strangers they are loved
A man who goes by the single letter "J" walks up to strangers in grocery aisles and on downtown Chicago sidewalks and tells them he loves them.
CHICAGO - A man who goes by the single letter "J" walks up to strangers in grocery aisles and on downtown Chicago sidewalks and tells them he loves them.
He has done it for about four years. Since May of this year, 125,000 people have followed along.
Spreading love in Chicago
The backstory:
It is almost always the same words.
"If nobody else tells you today, I love you. You stay in the fight."
Everything about a city is built to prevent that sentence. You do not make eye contact. You do not stop. You especially do not let a stranger stop you. J does it several times a day, without warning, on camera. He says no one has ever walked away.
"People get in there like, be careful," he said. "You can talk to anybody."
In August, at a Walmart in Decatur, Illinois, he said it to a man buying school supplies for a 5-year-old.
"That's good, because I just got diagnosed with cancer, so I hope I do," the man said.
"I got you," J told him. "He brought you through it, he'll bring you through."
He stopped recording when the man started crying. He asked permission before posting it.
He does not stop everyone. That is the part people miss when they watch the videos, where it looks like he approaches whoever is in front of him.
"I really truly sit there and I look and I say, okay, that person, when they walk past me, I felt something," he said. "If it's meant for me to talk to them, if we're in a store or something, they'll come back across my path again."
One woman crossed his path while he was on a call.
"I hung up the phone and I started talking to her," he said. "She didn't say a lot. But her eyes told me a lot."
Dig deeper:
J came here from Kansas City, Missouri, about two years ago so his children could go to school in Chicago. He has 10 children. Nine living. Ages 1 to 26.
His oldest son died in 2016. The mother of his children died. He has buried friends. He has been diagnosed with PTSD and anxiety, and he spent five days in intensive care with congestive heart failure. He is studying to become a pastor and does not have a congregation.
He says he started because of a question he asked himself on a day he could not get out from under.
"If I'm feeling like that, what is the next person going through?"
What he tells people is that they are already ahead.
"You've already won, you up and moving around, you here," he said. "Somebody didn't wake up today. Somebody didn't wake up in their right mind. Somebody woke up and tried to move their legs and they couldn't move them."
There is a complication in all of this, and J knows it. He is filming people who did not agree to be filmed. He says he asks when a conversation runs long, and that he took a video down within minutes when a woman told him her daughter was in the frame.
The camera is in a pair of glasses a friend in Texas mailed him. It means viewers see the face of everyone he stops and never see his. He says that is deliberate.
"If they was looking at me, the man, a lot of people would probably go the other way."
His son, a college student in Houston, saw one of the clips and told him to start a page. They built it May 29, on the son's birthday. Three months later, Instagram and TikTok began prompting him to switch to a business account, which would let him earn money from the videos.
"Every day I have to click the X out of there," he said. "I'm not doing it for that, because that takes away from the whole point."
He follows 15 accounts. More than 122,000 follow him.
Some days he stops one person. Some days dozens. He says he does not know in advance which it will be.
"I thought the world was going to end," he said. "You done been here too, don't lie. You done thought that everything was going crash down and it was the end of the world. But you got up the next day and things just started turning around one piece by another."
What's next:
If you or a loved one is feeling distressed, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The crisis center provides free and confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to civilians and veterans. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Or text HOME to 741-741 (Crisis Text Line). CLICK HERE https://afsp.org/risk-factors-and-warning-signs for the warning signs and risk factors of suicide. Call 1-800-273-TALK for free and confidential emotional support.
The Source: The information in this report came from an interview with J, his publicly shared social media content, and reporting by FOX Chicago's Terrence Lee.