This is not a poignant meditation, this is simply the sharing of an interesting occurrence and my thoughts on the matter.
Yesterday, I drove back to my hometown to attend the funeral service of an uncle of mine. It's complicated: this part of my family (with the exception of my father himself) rarely speaks to me. Not out of malice, or dislike, or anything like that, but moreso because they just don't think of me. My aunts played a large part in raising me when I was young, as my father worked a lot and they were already retired, but when I moved for a while and they had grandkids and other things to keep them busy we just lost touch, and never regained it. When I returned to California I spent a whirlwind 7 years mostly in LA, but also moving around and switching jobs quite often. My partner gets a little frustrated that I want to put the effort into reaching out to them, when they didn't attend our wedding, never met our child, etc.
But this was important to me, so I went. It was also important to me to see with my adult eyes this portion of my family: to find middle ground between adolescent feelings of abandonment and similarly adolescent feelings of idolization.
We're related to someone very famous, who's also quite disputed. Is she a trans icon? A traitor? A right wing lunatic? The public has all of the opinions, as they do. This cult of celebrity makes no sense to me. I don't particularly care that people are famous. I'd never met this person, I just have distinct memories of my grandmother receiving a christmas card from this reality-tv family and throwing it out in a big show, saying all kinds of things about their values.
But still, many, many people really care very much that people are famous, and either completely despise them or hang to their every word. So, I sat with this person at the reception, and we talked for an hour or so. I just, I think, needed to fulfill this curiosity: to find the reality.
There's the aesthetic aspect that becomes apparent here, "Instagram versus reality", or "magazine cover versus reality" that's interesting of course, and perspective shifting.
But more interesting is the realization that we all already know in this way, that this person is just a person, and that there's really no validity or reason whatsoever to their status as "celebrity". Furthermore, there was an interesting dichotomy between what felt like conversation without pretense: conversation about life, about childhood, about family. Then there were moments where this person would snap into character, and say something ridiculous and out of turn: about how many airplanes they've owned, about golfing with another particularly polarizing figure, and so on. These moments came and went, and it was almost like the experience of speaking with an elderly person who speaks half in memories and half in the moment, as lucidity comes and goes. I don't mean to imply that this person is mentally ill or infirm, of course, but just to describe the experience.
I think that this is interesting because perhaps it's a good reminder to us, who spend perhaps too much time online, to really take a step back and evaluate our feelings about certain people that we idolize or that are "famous" (even if it's in a small way, like here on Mastodon, or as a member of a niche community). Often it feels like reactions are intrinsically more charged when someone has this contextual background of fame, and receipts of their behavior are public for much longer than the average person. But perhaps it's psychologically healthy to only ever hold humans to human standards: this isn't to say you must like these people, but it is to say that perhaps removing yourself from their cult (whether your participation is idolizing or hateful) gives you more space to process what it is you think this person means and why you feel the way you do about them (and what would you do if you realized that they are no expert, and that if they did not have as much money or their face on the cover of magazines, you would pay them no mind? How does that impact your worldview? Your understanding of who you are and why you react the way you do?)
