One of the most interesting aspects of social media is that it gives you a perceived access to celebrities where you believe you know them more personally than you do, and your opportunities for illusion (and delusion) is thus proportionately higher. There are a lot of examples of this, but I will give one from my own recent experience which is a reminder of the danger of how seeing is not necessarily believing in this day and age.
There is a relatively unknown celebrity (maybe 50,000 followers or so?) that I have enjoyed watching recently, who has been on a journey of some personal self-discovery. It has been interesting following her journey, not because I share it, really, but because I do relate to some aspects of her experience and it has been interesting to watch her process it. She appears to be very open and honest (key word, appears,) and I slipped into thinking I "knew" her over the last few months, as I watched her go through this metamorphosis of personality.
I started out really liking who she was, but recently, I have been somewhat disillusioned. She has become (has she really become, or is this who she always was and I just didn't realize it because I didn't really know her?) someone I would probably not choose to be friendly with, although I do still think she is basically a kind and affirmative sort of person underneath. But she is brash, and sort of crazy and out there, and I think even my greatest admirers couldn't ever say that about me. So as it turns out, I don't think we have much in common after all, after starting off thinking maybe we did and I would enjoy her page.
But as I saw a couple other people call her out on the change on her facebook page, it had an interesting effect on me. Instead of agreeing with them, it made me bristle. Being on the internet doesn't make her their commodity or their personal friend. If you don't have her personal phone number, you are not friends in my book. And they don't really have the right to slot her into their square hole, no matter how often they have watched her being a round peg on TikTok or whatever their preferred mode of viewing may be.
Her response to them was short and to the point, and I admired her for having the courage to lay it out there. She said that she is allowed to be who she is in a given moment, and she doesn't answer to them, strangers on the internet. They can choose to follow her or not, but she is not going to be a certain way just to make followers happy, especially if that doesn't represent who she is any more. And I thought, you go girl. Because even though I agreed with the criticisms on a personal level for myself, I also agreed with her premise that we don't know who she really is, and she is allowed to be herself, and she doesn't exist to make us happy.
I have thought about this a lot the last few days, as I have seen several celebrities criticized for being too thin, too heavy, too this, too that, too much, not enough. I feel like being a celebrity must be exhausting because you are never, ever right. And social media is exacerbating that a million fold.
And here is where I'm going with this, because it does matter. Celebrities learn to tune out the noise. But the children among us don't have that capacity yet, and they hear the criticisms being leveled. The child who is body conscious hears the comments about size. The child who brings drama hears about being too much. The child who is thought filled hears about being too quiet. The world has become so noisy, so opinionated, so over-opinionated, no one is allowed to just be any more, and I think that is unhealthy.
In this Christmas season, I want to allow myself to be still. To give grace. To accept differences. To refrain from expectations that everything has to be done the way my grandmother did it. To embrace the new season of life that I am in and let go of some of the old that is no longer useful. To recognize that new is not bad, and change is not necessarily rejection. Sometimes its growth.
I will most likely stop following this celebrity, because she is not empowering me any longer with her journey. But I certainly do embrace her right to continue to evolve and wish her well in her continuing journey. Hopefully she finds her people along the road who can support who she is now and see her as valuable instead of trying to live up to a false narrative driven by likes on a website built on falseness. Just as we all should, no matter who we are.
