Working for a celebrity has this employee feeling ‘small’
DEAR CAROLYN: I have worked for a pretty significant celebrity (“X”) for most of my adult life. I started by nannying for them after college, then became their personal assistant, then took on more and more professional responsibilities over the years. It has been so wonderful in so many ways. Most of all, it’s let me experience a lifestyle that would have been way out of my league if I’d had some very regular job. It has also helped dispel a lot of myths about celebrities; basically, I don’t mythologize them at all anymore.
That said, I was on a date recently, and I was hit with the sudden epiphany that I do not feel like a real person living a real life. I was imagining being X or one of their friends watching me in a condescending way and thinking, you couldn’t pay them enough to go out to this shabby little restaurant with this person I was out with — but “good for her if she likes that.”
And then, sure enough, when I told X a little bit about the date later, they were like, “Oh, wow, good for you!!” I felt small and condescended to.
I told a friend about this, and she said it is time for me to leave my job because I see myself as a support player in a “real” person’s life, and I am no longer able to be satisfied by things that are available to me.
That feels right, yet I have invested more than a decade in this life and don’t want to leave it. How do I take the plunge, if I truly must? Also, do you think that, once I go back to the “real world,” I will ever be able to relate to it in a normal way again?
— In Proximity
DEAR READER: I can’t help you navigate your way “back to the ‘real world’” when I don’t buy into the construct. Any world you’re in is real. Any life you’re living is real. Weird, unexpected, hard for others to relate to, complicated, an occasional mind-erf, sure. And real.
If you were having a great time on your date, then you wouldn’t have gone out-of-body. Just saying.
Because I’m writing this on an average Tuesday from my average home in an average part of a maybe-above-average town, I’m inclined to justify staying put in your otherwise inaccessible lifestyle. So here’s an excuse to stay, if you want it: A celebrity is a mere mortal but also a business, and you help run “X” Inc. As long as you are treated with respect, are paid what you’re worth and aren’t performing tasks you find morally objectionable, there is nothing debasing about your work. A discerning approach to “things that are available to me” might be its greatest perk.
If you worked at an equivalent level in a corporate job, or an academic setting, or a lab or manufacturing plant, or a restaurant, or for a government official or department or in the military, just to name a few, then you’d have some version of a hierarchy. You’d still have a CEO or board president or VIP who wears better clothes to restaurants you can’t afford and responds with polite detachment to your personal news.
You wouldn’t have that if you became your own boss, maybe. But you might instead answer to customers and clients in a way that feels unpleasantly familiar.
In defense of those “real” (sub-posh) environments: They’re filled with people enjoying their privacy, their people, their work. So you have an excuse to go, too, if you want it.
*** We interrupt this advice with a loving defense of shabby restaurants. Where we eat beloved foods is about preference, too, not just the price point. ***
You don’t seem to have a clear impulse one way or the other, so it makes sense to stay, for now. Grant your “sudden epiphany” more time to tell you how you’re supposed to apply it to your very real life.
If your thought process reveals that X Inc. is bad for your mental health, or just your ambitions, then start thinking where you’d rather be. Surely you can parlay this unique experience into something more satisfying — and you can welcome the weirdness of the transition as a normal part of any major change. Sometimes the only answer to a “Will I ever … ?” question is to trust yourself.
If instead you realize your big epiphany was nothing more than, “I forget sometimes that I’m someone’s employee”? That might be a sign this is a pretty good job to have.
Please take care, too, not to drown out the message of your epiphany with the sound of your judgmental inner voice — the one calling you “small.” Small hearts and big egos make us small, and that’s about it.
Chat online with Carolyn at 11 a.m. each Friday at washingtonpost.com. Write to Tell Me About It in care of The Washington Post, Style Plus, 1150 15th St. N.W., Washington, DC 20071; or email