The Particular Loneliness of Being Admired

There is a woman in my life who has been admired for as long as I have known her, and I have watched the admiration do something to her over the years that I do not think she has the words for, even now, even after we have talked about it directly, even after she has heard me describe what I see when I look at her and has agreed with most of what I have said. The admiration is real. The people who admire her are not wrong. She is a person of significant accomplishment, of intelligence that is genuinely unusual, of a kind of carriage that produces in other people the immediate sense that they are in the presence of someone they should pay attention to. The admiration has been warranted, in other words. The warranted-ness of the admiration is part of what makes it so difficult to name what the admiration has cost her, because to name the cost feels, in some way, like an accusation against the people who have admired her, who have only been responding to what is actually there. 

What the admiration has cost her, I think, is the experience of being seen as a person rather than as a phenomenon, and the loss of that experience has produced in her a loneliness that the people who admire her cannot perceive because they are too busy admiring her to be able to see it. The phenomenon she has become is impressive. The phenomenon is composed of her actual qualities, which makes the phenomenon hard to dismiss as a fabrication. But the phenomenon is also not her. The phenomenon is a flat image, assembled out of the parts of her that admirers find admirable, with the other parts edited out because the other parts are inconvenient to the assembly. The phenomenon stands in for her. The phenomenon is what walks into rooms. The phenomenon is what people respond to. The actual person, the one with whom she has been alone since she was about nineteen, lives behind the phenomenon, in a kind of small back room, watching the phenomenon do its work, increasingly uncertain whether there is anyone in any of those rooms who would notice if the phenomenon and the person were ever to separate. 

This is the situation I want to write about. I want to write about it because it has been my situation, in smaller ways, and because it is the situation of nearly every woman I know who has built anything significant in the last twenty years. The admiration has done its work on us. The work is subtle. The work is largely invisible to the admirers. The work is, in some ways, a kind of erasure that no one would recognize as erasure because the woman being erased is the same woman everyone keeps looking at, and looking at very approvingly, and looking at a great deal. 

The first thing the admiration does is make it harder to be uncertain. The woman who is being admired for her competence, her judgment, her ability to handle things, learns quickly that uncertainty is not what the audience came for. The audience came for the performance of competence, which the admiration depends on, which the admiration in turn reinforces, which produces the conditions under which the woman performs more competence than she has, until eventually she cannot distinguish between the competence she has and the competence she is performing. The performance becomes the role. The role becomes the woman, in the eyes of the audience and increasingly in her own eyes. The actual uncertainty she experiences, which is significant, which is appropriate to the actual conditions of her work, has nowhere to go. She cannot bring it to her admirers because they would be confused. She cannot bring it to her competitors because they would use it. She often cannot even bring it to herself, because bringing it to herself requires sitting with it long enough to feel it, and sitting with it long enough to feel it produces in her a kind of panic that she has been trained, by the admiration itself, to suppress immediately and replace with another act of visible competence. 

The second thing the admiration does is make it harder to be helped. The woman who is being admired is, by definition, the woman who is supposed to be helping others, not the woman who needs help herself. The asymmetry of the position is baked in. She is the one being looked up to. The looking up flows in one direction. Any attempt to redirect the flow, any attempt to indicate that she also needs the kind of attention that the looking up has been providing to other people through her, produces in her admirers a kind of cognitive dissonance that they often resolve by simply not registering what she is asking. She has said something that does not fit the picture they have of her. They are not interested in adjusting the picture. They are interested in the picture they have. So they hear her saying what she said as a kind of false modesty, or a humble brag, or a momentary off-day, anything that allows the picture to remain intact. The asking does not produce the helping. The asking produces a kind of polite confusion that closes the door faster than not asking would have. 

The third thing the admiration does is make it harder to have peers. The admirer is not a peer. The admirer is the person who has, by the act of admiring, placed himself or herself in a position that is structurally below the admired woman, and the structural position cannot be reversed by either party at will. The woman who tries to befriend her admirers, who treats them as equals, who attempts to bring the relationship down to a level of mutual exchange, discovers that the admirers are not interested in being brought down. They like the height they have given her. The height is part of what they enjoy in the relationship. They want to be in the presence of someone above them. They do not want to be in the presence of someone at their level, especially not at the level of the person they had been admiring, because the demotion would be painful to them and would also call into question the judgment they had been exercising in admiring her in the first place. So they resist the demotion. The admiration persists. The peer relationship does not form. The woman remains, in this particular relationship, the figure she has been from the beginning, and the figure she will remain, because the relationship was structured around the figure rather than around her. 

This pattern, multiplied across all the admiring relationships in her life, produces a network that contains many people and very few peers. She knows everyone. She is known by everyone. But she is alone with the actual experience of being herself, because almost no one in the network has access to that experience. The access has been blocked by the admiration that originally connected them. The admiration has built a wall that the admirer cannot see and that the admired woman discovers she cannot dismantle without losing the relationship altogether. She does not want to lose all of these relationships. She has worked for them. She values aspects of them. So she leaves the walls up. She accepts that the relationships will operate at the level the walls allow, which is shallow, which is admiring, which is structurally incapable of producing the kind of contact she has begun to suspect she actually needs. 

What the woman wants, at some point in this process, is the experience of being looked at by someone who is neither below her nor above her. The lateral gaze. The peer gaze. The gaze that comes from another person who is doing what she is doing, who knows what she is doing because they are doing it themselves, who can see her without the distortion that admiration produces. This kind of gaze is rare. It becomes rarer the more she accomplishes, because the more she accomplishes, the more she is placed in the elevated position that prevents the lateral relationship from forming. Her own success has been building the conditions of her loneliness. She did not understand, when she was building the success, that this was what success would do. No one told her. The cultural narratives about success had not prepared her for this part. They had described the rewards, which are real. They had not described the corresponding losses, which are also real, and which become harder to compensate for the more they accumulate. 

I have watched several women in my life arrive at this point. The point is not a crisis. It is a quiet recognition that arrives, often in their forties, that the life they have built has produced an outcome they did not anticipate, and the outcome involves a kind of loneliness that the admiration was supposed to have prevented and has in fact created. The recognition is followed, in some women, by a decision to retreat. They stop seeking admiration. They begin to refuse the elevation. They start saying no to things that would have produced more admiration, and they start saying yes to things that would not. The decisions look, from the outside, like withdrawal, like burnout, like a fall from the height the admiration had placed them at. They are not, in most cases, any of these. They are an attempt to construct a life in which the lateral gaze becomes possible, which requires the elevation to be dismantled, which requires the dismantling to be a deliberate project rather than an accidental decline. 

The decision to dismantle the elevation is one of the harder decisions an admired woman can make. The admiration is, in many cases, a significant portion of how she experiences her own identity. To give up the admiration is to give up a particular version of herself that she has been performing for so long that she is no longer sure who she would be without it. The performance has been protective. The performance has produced the conditions under which she has been allowed to operate in rooms that would not have admitted her otherwise. To set down the performance is to risk being told to leave the rooms, which would be a real loss, even though the rooms have not, in the end, given her what she once thought they would. 

What I am describing is, I think, a particular form of grief that is rarely named. The grief of having gotten what you wanted and discovered that it did not include what you needed. The grief of having been admired and discovered that the admiration was not the same thing as being known. The grief of having built a life that other people envy and discovered that the envy is not, in itself, sustaining, and that you cannot, in the end, live on the envy of strangers, no matter how many of them are envying you. 

The woman I started this essay with is still in the process of figuring out what to do with what she has learned. She is not, at this point, going to dismantle anything dramatically. She is making smaller adjustments. She is choosing one or two relationships, very carefully, in which she is attempting to interrupt the admiration pattern and replace it with something else. The attempts are imperfect. The pattern is strong. The work of building a peer relationship out of a pattern that has been structurally non-peer for years is slow, and she does not have a guarantee that it will succeed. She is trying anyway. She is trying because the alternative, which is to continue the loneliness, has become untenable. 

I do not know if she will succeed. I am rooting for her. I am also rooting for myself, in smaller ways, and for the other women I know who are working on this same project from their various positions and with their various resources. The project does not have a name yet. The project is the project of unbuilding the conditions of our own admiration in order to be able to be in relationships that the admiration has been preventing. The project is significant. The project is, I think, one of the more important projects available to women who have spent their careers being admired, because the alternative is to remain in the loneliness for the rest of our lives, and the loneliness has not, in my experience, gotten any easier with time. The loneliness has only gotten more permanent. The work of unmaking it is the work of breaking the pattern that produced it, which means breaking, in some way, the pattern of the admiration itself. There is no neat way to do this. There is only the long, awkward, mostly invisible work of trying. The trying is what I want to recommend, to the women who recognize themselves in this. The trying is what I am doing. The trying is, at this point, what I have.