Mood: Withdrawn
Drinking: The Usual Tea
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the nature of celebrity. (And no, this isn’t a post about Paris. I refuse to waste any energy on such a waste of soul.)
My conclusions are simple and baldly unoriginal… I don’t want celebrity to ever happen to me.
Not that I have no ambition, no desire to make a dent. I do. I just want to retain enough anonymity that papparazzo and gossip bloggers never know where I live. I want to remain boring enough that nobody ever cares what I wear to the grocery store. I want to keep a low profile so that the crazies would have to bend down to notice me.
(Although, lately? Crazies score 1 to my big fat zero.) It’s mystifying to me how you can accidentally attract the attention of an unstable person and then, no matter how hard you try to shrink into the shadows, no matter how much logic and reason you have on your side, no matter how preposterously insane the rants start to get, no matter whether you choose silence or rational conversation, you cannot get the crazy to look somewhere else, to stare at some other shiny object. You cannot make it go away.
True, I could pack up my website and run and hide. But that would be letting the terrorists win, or something. No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to be scared into submission by one small and lonely bully. I’m going to carry on with the usual, inbox aside.
But if I, with my small and quite modest fan club, if I am so powerless to stop such pedestrian harassment, if I just have to put up with it and pretend it doesn’t exist, how much worse must it be for the actual fame-ridden? To everyday pull on the famous facade. The bleached perma-smile. The public persona. To get used to the lack of personal space. The random Joe from Pokomo assuming he actually knows who you are. The constant press of flesh. The terrible things that get written and whispered about you that aren’t anywhere close to true.
And in the midst of it all, even behind their high walls and moneyed mansions, the fortunate & celebrated can’t really defend themselves against the false perceptions and the fictional pull quotes. People will always believe whatever they want to believe, truth and actuality be damned. (I’m even guilty of it myself. Notice the way I started this post with a snide little Hilton aside.)
It’s horrible… I don’t even want to think about living a life like that. They can keep the wealth and the privilege and the notoriety. I don’t need my face to be billboard-sized. I don’t need the whole world (or even a whole town) to know my name.
When my sister and I were small and got into the usual sibling spat, I liked to try to shut her down with brilliant retorts such as: “Mind your own beeswax!”
It’s what I feel like yelling out into the ether now, though it would do me no good. “Mind your own! Leave me and mine alone!”
-Lo, who really adores peace and the lovely quiet that comes with it.
LaDonnaWitmer 