Anonymous We

Meryl Streep says that real life is like high school.

Well, if the latest Hollywood scandals dominating the media focus are any indication, I'd say she's right.

 But does this old saying ring a bell; He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone?

The capacity to be flawed is not special. It runs in everyone, famous or not.

The truth is, and I learned this very early in life, you never know what situations you will be faced with and whether or not in those moments, you will be able to rely on the integrity of your actions.

Who are any of us to judge? You're not living unless you're making mistakes.

 Like most people, the only way I was going to learn about life, to learn about myself, was by making one constructive, healthy, dramatic, tragic, reactive, stupid, careless mistake after another.

Enough mistakes anyway, to form a bunch of gooey, yummy good stuff in between. Thank God no one knew who I was!

If the mistakes I made in my formative years were exposed to the degree that much of young Hollywood's lives are today, I guarantee you I'd be in worse shape than they are now. Wouldn't we all?

But the public loves to worship young starlets only to tear them down the minute they show an ounce of imperfection. Not only do they love to do it, they love to talk about why they do it.

And this is why. The non-famous love to obsess over the lives of the famous (as if it's entertainment) when they fall because, we would love to have their problems.

This is only a reason, not a justification and I use the term we loosely.

We, who have no idea what that glitzy world is really like, no idea what it feels like to be scrutinized down to our active wear, or to be followed by the narcissistic destructive attention of paparazzi; we think, we would prefer to have the annoyance of that gross attention be the main problem in our life. 

But instead, we, anonymous we, have problems like whether or not we can afford health insurance, or have time off to spend with our family, or the opportunity to travel somewhere obscure and mysterious like...Nova Scotia?

Instead we worry about rent, putting food on the table, how we're going to pay the electric bill in the summer, and how to pay for a divorce lawyer at all, let alone the divorce settlement. 

We battle problems of basic survival and maintaining a desired quality of life, of having enough of any kind of attention from any one with which we hope to find to love. 

For the most part, we battle these kinds of problems. And perhaps, from our perspective, they do not.

I am not quantifying degrees of pain or struggle. And I am not saying that any great degree of public success warrants, or justifies an onslaught of equal public pain. It does not. 

I'm just calling it like it is. We would love our biggest problem to be that our life's private drama is the drama of the center of the world.

We envy this problem of the young, rich and famous. And we can envy them because the truth is, we cannot ever truly know what it is we are actually envying.

What is it really like to have their problems? And would we, anonymous we, really want to know?

(photo courtesy of Blake Gardner)

Yours Truly-- Ann Hu

 

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