Never Meet Your Heroes

What Happens When You Get Close Enough to Fame to See the Machine

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was slumped over my desk, mentally packing up my water bottle and stained Tupperwares, counting down the minutes until I could escape the fluorescent lighting and relentless office chatter.

My editor Slacked me: a wellness writer I didn’t know had asked me to review her first cookbook.

She was a nobody, and so was I. But I felt chosen, and at that stage of my career, that feeling alone was intoxicating.

Her cookbook was wholly interchangeable with every other healthy eating cookbook crowding the market at the time, all grain-free brownies and cauliflower substitutions, but our readers loved that sort of thing, so I happily included it.

Then her career took off. Then so did mine.

First, it was social media pleasantries. Then occasional DMs. Then conversations. Years passed. She launched a podcast. I launched a business. I tuned into her show and reposted episodes. Friends would casually mention listening while I nodded and said, almost proudly, “Oh, I know her. She’s really lovely in real life.”

Then one day she reached out again. She said she was looking for help behind the scenes on her podcast and thought I’d be a perfect fit to research, write, and edit. Because we already knew each other, the conversation felt easy. Familiar. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t already mentally booked the plane ticket and begun imagining my new life around the possibility that the role was mine.

I filled out forms. We spoke on the phone. We slipped easily into the kind of conversational intimacy the internet is so good at manufacturing.

And then:

Nothing.

Not even a rejection email. Not even a polite “we decided to move in another direction.” Just silence from someone whose public persona was built around openness, vulnerability, and thoughtful communication.

The whole thing left me with the strange, destabilizing feeling of a child realizing Santa’s handwriting looks suspiciously similar to their parents’.

And listen, I’m a freelancer. I can handle rejection. Half this job is sending ideas into the void and never hearing back. That’s business, not personal.

But when you spend years chatting with someone online only to get ghosted like an emotionally unavailable Tinder date who secretly has a girlfriend back home, well, that feels different.

Because at a certain point, you’ve discussed childhood trauma. Career anxieties. Relationships. Mental health. The strange intimacy of the internet starts to mimic real friendship, even when it technically isn’t one.

And maybe that confusion is inevitable now. We don’t just consume public figures anymore. We listen to them while folding laundry. Hear about their breakups while driving to work. Watch them cry on TikTok, unpack groceries on Instagram Stories, confess insecurities into podcast microphones.

Over time, the performance of intimacy starts to feel like intimacy itself.

But one bad experience does not make a worldview. As a journalist, I’ve spent more time than the average person around famous people: chefs, influencers, actors, directors, founders, and CEOs. And it probably won’t shock you to learn that some are amazing and some are terrible. Wow, groundbreaking insight there.

Like beauty, money, or status, celebrity exerts its own gravitational pull on the world around it. Its own form of power.

The first time you witness that power up close, the allure suddenly makes perfect sense. People soften around fame. Become more accommodating. Complimentary. Eager to please. Rules that apply to everyone else quietly dissolve. Free things appear. Doors open. Opportunities beget opportunities.

It’s not just admiration. It’s social power operating in real time.

And when you’re benefiting from that kind of power, I imagine it eventually starts to feel normal. Like green light after green light on your drive home. Of course, the world opens for you. Why wouldn’t it?

Maybe that’s why she never answered my email. Not out of cruelty, necessarily, but because she didn’t realize how much it would matter to me when it mattered so little to her.

I almost didn’t write this piece because, in many ways, I had participated in the machinery too. I had reviewed her cookbook positively. Promoted her work. Offered my time, energy, and ideas freely because proximity to someone ascending in the world felt exciting, validating even.

And if I’m being honest, I benefited from the association too.

I’ve read plenty of think pieces lately arguing that we’re entering the post-celebrity era, that audiences are growing tired of influencers and carefully managed personal brands. Maybe that’s true.

But I don’t think the impulse itself is going anywhere.

There will always be people we collectively decide are more beautiful, more important, more interesting, more worthy of attention than the rest of us. The faces may change. The platforms may change. But hierarchy has a remarkable way of reinventing itself.

Maybe the real lesson isn’t that famous people are secretly terrible or fake or uniquely narcissistic. Most are probably just regular people adapting to an incredibly strange system.

The more uncomfortable realization is how eager we are to participate in that system ourselves. How quickly we project meaning onto proximity. How badly we want to feel chosen by people we’ve elevated in our own minds.

Not because they’re gods.

But because somewhere along the way, we decided they were.