FAME

Curiosity, temptation, or experience?

Photo by Pauline Bernard on Unsplash

As a child, I often listened to conversations about fame. My stepfather spoke of it as if it were a promise waiting just beyond the horizon.

“You will see,” he would say, not quite predicting, not quite threatening. “I will become very famous after my death. Just like so many painters before me.”

He lived among ghosts — Velázquez, Goya — men who had suffered, struggled, and were finally understood too late. Their stories nourished him. He believed in them the way others believe in religion.

At the time, I did not know whether his longing for fame came from being overlooked or from a deeper conviction that true art could only be recognized in retrospect. He worked as a freelance painter, stubbornly devoted to his vision. He refused commissions that felt too easy, too decorative, too commercial. To him, selling oneself was a quiet kind of betrayal.

“An artist must suffer,” he insisted. “Poverty, discipline, solitude — this is the path.”

He spoke with a certain contempt about those who succeeded too easily. Fame, if it came too early, was suspect. Recognition, if it brought comfort, was impure.

He never kept track of the paintings he sold. They disappeared into private homes, crossed borders, vanished into lives we would never know.

“After I die,” he would say with a distant smile, “critics and art historians will have to search for them. Imagine that. A treasure hunt across countries.”

My mother would look up from whatever practical task filled her day and shake her head.

“Who do you think will be interested in them?” she asked calmly. “Besides your own children? And you want to make it harder for them on purpose?”

At least one of them stood firmly on the ground.

I grew up somewhere between those two worlds — between dream and pragmatism. But when I chose my path, it was neither for suffering nor for fame. I became a ballerina because I loved to dance.

I loved music that filled the body from within. I loved repetition, discipline, the quiet conversation between movement and sound. And yes, I loved the stage — the moment when light isolates you, and everything else falls away.

It was not fame I wanted, but presence.

Years later, when I traveled to Japan and performed on the other side of the world, I caught a glimpse of what my stepfather had longed for. Not the glory, but the attention.

People recognized me. They asked the same questions again and again, each conversation beginning where the last had ended. Their curiosity was genuine, but relentless. Time dissolved into small talk. I could no longer choose freely whom to speak with, or how long to stay.

Attention, I realized, is not the same as connection.

Around that time, I met one of Hemingway’s granddaughters. It was not the meeting itself that stayed with me, but what surrounded her. People circled her constantly — watchful, eager, intrusive in subtle ways. Their smiles did not quite reach their eyes.

And then I looked at her.

There was something there I recognized immediately — not sadness exactly, but a kind of quiet suffocation. As if the air around her had grown too thin. As if every interaction took something instead of giving.

For a moment, I wanted to reach out, to pull her away from it all. But that was not my place, and not my power.

Still, she gave me something.

“Be happy,” she said. “And enjoy your freedom.”

It was not advice. It was a message sent from a place I had only briefly visited — and she had never truly left.

Later, I thought again of my stepfather, of his dream of being discovered too late, of strangers searching for fragments of his life scattered across the world.

Perhaps he was not entirely wrong. Perhaps recognition does come, sometimes, in strange and delayed ways.

But I also understood something he never seemed to question:

Fame, when it arrives, does not give you your life. It takes hold of it.

And freedom — the simple ability to choose your time, your silence, your company — is far more fragile, and far more valuable, than any legacy others might build from your name.