What makes a star out of a mortal human being? I’m not talking about people who have celebrity status because they’ve been carefully packaged by an army of PR people and pushed in our faces until we learn to love them.
I’m talking idols. People who inspire the generation they are a part of and even generations of people after they are gone. People that we feel carry something divine in them, something special, something that we, mortals, don’t have.
I’m talking Freddy Mercury, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, people of this status.
People who are different – if we had to find a common denominator. They are simply unlike anybody else in their ranks; they may be strange, eccentric, scandalous, many times they’re not understood during the times they live in. They have the power to make us feel uncomfortable. They make us think, question things, life.
I’d like to argue that what truly binds these people is that they are unapologetically authentic, they live by their own truth and world view. That’s what makes them special, and that’s what makes them attractive.
They’re unburdened by the desire to fit in, it’s far more important to be true to who they are and what they believe in. And that’s what we admire. They are successful in fighting the deadly instinct to blend with the crowd. It may be difficult, even scary. And it may have been unbearable to approach life in any other way, but these people have had the courage to be themselves. To speak their mind, to live their truth.
And in doing so, they lift the veil of the ordinary and show us that we can indeed, if we have the courage, be more like that too. The truth is, we all long that deep inside but the majority of us fall victim to the crowd. Our fear of rejection, our traumas, the feeling that we’re not as perfect, as talented, as special push us into believing we’re ordinary. It’s easier, less scary to pretend you’re just like everybody else.
Author Brene Brown talks about vulnerability and why we shouldn’t avoid it. You see, we have the unrealistic expectation of being perfect and hence we need to present a perfect image to the world – no problems, no fears, no mistakes, no traumas. It’s that perfect image we’re working to show the world overtime, in the meantime missing out on being simply us. We are afraid to show vulnerability even to our closest friends. On the other hand, we like platforms like Instagram – they give us an outlet where we can pretend to be perfect and perfectly happy.
Thing is, instead of connecting with people we end up putting them off. We do have problems, we feel not enough, we fail, we are weak, we sometimes cry, we are jealous, and can feel rage and hatred at times. Being happy and successful is only half of our story, certainly the more beautiful and pleasant one. The irony is we work so hard to show that half only, trying to fit in, when it is that part indeed that makes others feel inadequate. It makes them think they are failing if they feel any other way than happy and perfect themselves.
Vice versa. When we show any sort of vulnerability – fear, sorrow, regret, failure – something unexpected happens – we connect with others because they can relate. They resonate with us because these are emotions we all share, we understand. We can feel compassion towards someone who has that experience because we know it painfully well what. We feel we’ve found somebody we share something with.
What Brene Brown says about vulnerability is undeniably true – it has the power to create connections. Yet, I feel there is a larger truth at play. That is, people instinctively feel authenticity. They can smell it on you. When there is a part of you they can relate to, they instinctively like you. And when they wish they themselves were not afraid to show that part, they feel attracted to you.
Let’s talk Merlin Monroe for a moment.
Clearly she was a marketing product to a great extent. She was an ordinary girl packaged in the shiniest of shiny packagings – sex appeal. She was pretty, probably not tremendously prettier than most other actresses of her time. And she was a film star even if less talented in her acting skills than many others at the time. What made Merlin Monroe, Merlin Monroe, was neither her appearance, nor her acting skills alone. It was that large dose of vulnerability and the aura of being troubled around her. This is what people connected to. There is something attractive about someone with baggage, it shows their humanity. It feels real, authentic and likable.
If she’d tried to build the image of a femme fatale, she would have probably been long forgotten because that’s not who she was. Who she was, was a troubled, fragile young woman and that’s what came through in her performance too.
One may argue that she was built as this troubled and that this was her image. And maybe this is true but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, that’s exactly who she was in reality. And that’s why it worked – she was authentic.
We work so hard to hide what we perceive as a weakness or ugliness. What makes us “the odd one out”. The irony is, these are the things indeed that make us likable.
So why try to fit in? You are the main character in the movie you’re playing in your head all the time. Make that character a star – somebody who is not afraid to be themselves, not a cheap copy of somebody they admire, not a fake. But somebody real –somebody proud to show strength when that’s what they feel, unafraid to show weakness when that’s the case, somebody with their own ideas and mode of expression. Somebody unique and uniquely beautiful as you truly, really are.
