Series of articles and observations on pop-culture and society told from an unusual perspective. I lived the celebrity lifestyle myself (as an MTV VJ), but threw in the towel in 2001 and buggered off to the jungles of Belize, where I still live with...
Fame is a funny thing; it places people under a magnifying glass; it distorts and creates caricatures of them, but also offers a strange kind of clarity to those who are observing from the outside. It can hold up a mirror reflecting life lessons back to the larger public from a slightly different angle.
Fame is like a fairytale. And fairytales have been used since the beginning of time to teach us about ourselves, turning true stories into fiction and fiction into deep truths. You may look at celebrity and see shallowness, I see these deep spiritual truths glimmering from underneath a dump load of distractions.
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I have had the privilege of experiencing fame from the inside and the outside, giving me an unusual perspective. As an MTV VJ, all throughout the nineties, I lived the celebrity lifestyle; interviewing and traveling around the world with a large variety of artists, DJs, and other music industry professionals. My face was regularly on the cover of magazines, I got to host award shows, run with the Olympic torch, was given free designer clothes, got paid to show up at parties and became friends with other celebrities. Fame and its trappings were all around me.
But then my partner (now husband) and I made a drastic and unexpected move. In 2001 we burned all our carefully constructed bridges and moved to the Central American jungle. He was a professional football player who was retiring because of ill health. Though his career had come to an end, it was still an illogical choice, and for me even more so. Why did we do it? Just for the hell of it. Just to see what would happen. I ripped up the contract for my new TV show and off we went!
Don't cling to fame. You're just borrowing it. It's like money. You'll die and somebody else is going to get it.
-Sonny Bono
Almost two decades later, we are still in Belize. From one moment to the next, we had not only become two has-beens; we moved to a country where our past was completely unknown and where no one cared about who or what we were before. We were complete nobodies again overnight, swapping our high horses for donkeys when we opened a jungle lodge and adventure travel company. These days, as we serve others and their (sometimes) demanding habits, we have very few of them left ourselves.
Having lived both the celebrity lifestyle and a ''normal'' life, I can tell you that celebrities face the same issues that we all face. The play of their life is just like yours, it's simply acted out on a different stage set. It is a stage set that many get thrown onto overnight -- in the dark. And just by touch, they have to, somehow, find their way around whilst a full auditorium of people are looking on, cheering and laughing. Fame teaches harsh lessons and gives great rewards.
Though I ended up a happy and contented has-been, it took me years of intense soul searching, years of mourning my crazy decision to leave, and years of recreating myself anew to get to this place. Now that those troubled years are well behind me, I can tell you that there is gold at the end of the showbiz rainbow, but it is not the gold that you imagine. Strangely enough, it's often when you believe that you have lost it all that the revelation, 'None of it is real' comes to you when the wind whispers into your ear, 'It never mattered' and suddenly you know, the stage set was interchangeable. What mattered was the play itself. And that's when you look back and start to see the lessons that were there all along; you start picking up the random puzzle pieces and the hidden gems that were left behind and you use them to create your very own unique pot of gold at the end of your rainbow. Living happily ever after!
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"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something; your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
