To Be.. Under the Sun!

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Who among us has not wished at some moment to be recognized? To enter a place and have people turn to look at you, to have your name mentioned in a gathering you did not attend, and to find your opinion sought even on matters unrelated to you? I don't think we need more than a little honesty with ourselves to admit that deep down, every person has a small child who wants to be seen. They may try to pretend to hide this desire by claiming that they do not care about anyone's opinion, but it remains there, somewhere, waiting for its moment to reveal itself like any deferred desire!

The common image of fame resembles a tourist advertisement, smiling faces, doors opening before you knock, and a hospitality that requires nothing to deserve it, with a red carpet that separates your luxurious shoes from the ordinary dirty ground that ordinary people walk on. It is an image similar to those tourist ads about the golden beach and the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, showing you the sun's reflection with its shiny light, but it does not tell you about its burning heat at noon!

Someone might say that the heat of the sun is a source of warmth that we all need at times, and this is certainly true. However, the problem is that the sun, my friends, does not only warm; it also reveals. The first thing that a person loses when they become known is their right to be ordinary. An ordinary person has the right to be tired one day, or irritable in a certain situation, or wrong in an opinion they expressed hastily, and even foolish in some of their actions. Then they can sleep and wake up having forgotten what they said or did. However, for someone living under the sun, every small slip is illuminated, magnified, and preserved, to the point that it seems a single moment of weakness is enough to erase years of stability, discovering that they are no longer measured by the entirety of who they are, but by the worst snapshot taken of them!

Then comes the more difficult problem of fame, which is that people do not deal with you as you are, but with the version they have created of you. They get closer to the image and distance themselves from the real person. They love you without having spent an hour with you, and they hate you without having heard your voice except through a screen. In both cases, you do not know if what is being said truly concerns you, as the praise is for a person you do not know, and the criticism is directed at someone you are not, while you stand in the middle wondering which one is closer to you?!

The most dangerous thing of all is that the image imposed on you by others may begin to confine you to be a permanent prisoner of it, so you find yourself reviewing your words before you say them, not because they are wrong, but because they may "not be fitting for you." You postpone announcing your new opinion because people have memorized your old one, and you laugh in a forced conversation with someone on a day when you can't even bear to smile. Little by little, you become an employee of your image, working full-time to guard it, while the person you were before fame sits in a distant corner waiting for someone to return to him!

There is also a price that is not often mentioned, which is the light itself. Applause is like any delicious thing we consume in excess, making the body crave a larger dose to feel the same effect. When interest wanes for a week or a month, some begin to suffer from a strange anxiety, which is not like the anxiety over livelihood or health, but rather the anxiety of being forgotten. People write what they do not believe in to remain in memory, and they appear where they should not appear so it is not said that they have disappeared!

This discussion does not concern only celebrities; we have all become, in the age of screens, living under a small sun, each according to the number of their followers. We weigh our words before publishing them, await interaction after posting, and suffer from a comment written by an unknown person who neither knows us nor do we know them. What was once a price paid by a few has become a tax paid by everyone to varying degrees, and the difference between us and the famous is the size of the sun, not its nature!

The shadow, my friend, is not a punishment as we imagine when we look towards the light, but it may be the only place where you can be yourself without anyone applauding you or judging you. Those who find themselves under the sun may sometimes need a small umbrella to protect what remains of them, while those who are still in the shadow and dream of coming out may need to ask themselves one question before they take a step: Do I want everyone to know me, or do I just need one person who truly understands me?