Leper

There’s another thing that happens when the Fame has faded, when it has descended in that sand-through-the-fingers way. It’s rotten and uncomfortable. You’re already getting some of those slightly disappointed looks when you go out, and you know that public-adulation part of your Fame reality has already being pulled out from under you. But then you feel it from others in the business, your contemporaries; that’s the rotten and uncomfortable part. This was me, at a birthday party in LA, at a club where about half the people were well-known, famous. Me, then feeling them wanting to peel away from me. My Fame had been fading for a while. I had had the clothing company, had come back into the business and done a Showtime series and a few pilots. But, I don’t want to make this about career. We’re keeping the focus on Fame. Let’s say I’m squarely, involuntarily in that frustrating “Are you still acting?” moment in public, with Fame.

It was around 2006/2007. So, my Fame is nothing like it once was, but I’m the same person. I still have the same talent and skills as before. Nothing shouId have changed between me and other actors, performers, in my business, right? I go to this party, I may have gone by myself, even. I know the birthday boy, and some of his friends, so I probably went alone. I make conversation with a couple of people I know and I meet a few new people. But, I notice that the well-known people, the very well-known people, the ones who have the level of Fame I had had not long before, these people kind of lean away from me. The polite, tight smiles when talking to me, as if I’m somebody’s cousin visiting from Ohio. Fucking really? I mean, that “Wassup” between two equally famous people, with the head nod across a crowded room, in an airport, wherever. The “I know what you’re going through. I dig you. Wassup?” That was gone. That was not being offered to me anymore, not at this party, maybe not ever again. Fuck. Not that I was sad that these famous-as-I-used-to-be people weren’t becoming my best friends. It was this feeling that I was being regarded as a fucking LEPER. As if there was some scent I was emitting, some toxin that was warding off Fame and continuous employment. As if getting near me would contaminate their still-ascending Fame. Me. Justine Bateman. (Sure, call me arrogant.) Such a shitty feeling.

In psychology they call this “stigmatization,” the roots of which are in “disease avoidance.” An evolutionary survival technique, sure: avoid those who appear to be infected and survive. In doing this, we create stigmas, a sort of shorthand for who to avoid, only our brains often do not make the distinction between conditions that are contagious and those that are not.

On the one hand, I wanted to get the hell out of there and lick my wounds and carry on with my can’t-get-traction-in-the-Fame-world life alone. On the other hand, I wanted to take hold of them and say, “Listen, stop with the fucking attitude. Look at me as the person I am, not by the measure of my current Fame. You’re not going to fucking catch it.” But hey, who knows how Fame works. Maybe you can catch “Faded Fame.” I don’t know. Fame is so mercurial. It was not something they were willing to fuck around with.

Now, here, you know what happens. When someone treats you, a whole collection of people treat you, a certain way, you have a choice. You can either reject this reality they’re trying to spray on you and decide they’re just a bunch of stupid children, or you can try to make sense of how they’re treating you, how they are “right.” The first choice has you making them wrong. The second choice, the leper choice, has you making yourself wrong. And what’s the risk? The first choice, where they’re wrong and you’re right, where you recognize that they are trying to impose a reality on you because of their own fears and insecurities, leaves your self-esteem intact. But it also puts you out in the cold. You are now not part of their reality, because you won’t play the part they have assigned you. You are separate, you are other, you are out. The second choice, the one where you are a leper, makes them right and you wrong. And what do you get from picking this choice? You get to participate in their world. Yeah, I know that sounds strange. If the only way you can participate in their world now is to play the part of the Faded Fame Leper, why would you want that? Well, ask any fat kid who ever let his seventh grade class mock him all year. At least that way they had “accepted” him, at least he was IN.

You, reading this book, in your living room, on the couch, by the window, maybe a cup of tea by your side. Or you, on an airplane, in the darkness, reading with the overhead light on, even though your seatmate is trying to sleep. You may think that sounds bizarre, for me to have taken that second “leper choice” at the party, where I was wrong and they were “right,” in order to feel part of their reality. But we do it all the time. In small ways, big ways, we all do it. And every time we tell ourselves it’s harmless. Most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

Maybe you are at a gathering of people who are a little fancier than you. Maybe those well-dressed moms at your kid’s school or people at a rival company whom you see at every trade conference. Maybe it’s the volleyball team you play against, from that school across town, the ones who always seem so above it all. These are people who react toward you as if you are lower or different or just something you’re not. They are trying to impose a reality on you, see? They look down on you, maybe. They cast you as a character that’s not you. And you choose. You make a choice to let them be wrong or to let them be right. If you decide they are wrong, you keep your self-esteem, but you lose the opportunity to “connect” with them. If you decide to make them “right,” you feel like shit about yourself, but at least you have an invitation, almost, to be part of their world, because you’re playing a part they have given you. You get to choose. Every single time.

That’s what I did with the Gold Dress Episode and the Face Disaster. With the Gold Dress Episode, I decided that the “critics” were wrong about my dress, and that I was right about my dress being awesome. I picked my reality and I felt great as a result. In the Face Disaster, where I was ripped apart online for the appearance of my face, I decided that I was wrong and that the trolls were right about my face being a horrifying sight. I picked their “imposed reality” and I felt terrible for years as a result. It’s not fucking worth it.