Fame & Disgrace

This is the last of four articles about the eight worldly concerns. In Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's Joyful Path of Good Fortune, he describes this pairing as follows:

• Being pleased when enjoying a good reputation
  
• Being displeased when not enjoying a good reputation.

In other traditions, I have heard it stated simply as "fame & disgrace."

When I was a child and teenager, I used to fantasize about being famous. I had a talent for writing songs and playing the piano, and I imagined that someday I would be a famous musician.

Whenever I had these fantasies, I would experience a feeling of euphoria. It seemed so important to be famous -- like an enormously big deal.

Now, looking back, I can easily trace my hunger for fame to my feelings of low self-worth. Because of circumstances at home and at school, I came to believe that my feelings did not matter and therefore, I did not matter. Being famous would be a way to matter -- to be important to someone, or many someones.

I never achieved the fame I longed for. Various circumstances conspired to send me on the path of being a pre-med student instead. I was still trying to matter, just in a different way.

I fell short of medical school and became a medical technologist, and that was when my dreams of fame came back. I was active in my church music program, and wrote songs for our group. Everyone at church seemed to love me. I was famous, in that small way. Our band recorded two live concert albums and one of my songs even got brief airplay (by a deejay who happened to be our percussionist's cousin).

Finally, impressed with what I had done, my parents offered to front the money to send me and my then-husband to the Gospel Music Association's Seminar in the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado. With the excitement of finally pursuing a long-held dream, I recorded three of my best songs and entered them in the songwriting competition.

The preliminary competition was judged based on the recordings only, and on the very first night of the festival, the semifinalists were to be announced. I sat on the edge of my seat, stylus poised above my Palm device so I could write down the names of my songs that were in the semifinals. There were twenty semifinalists. When they had read ten and not gotten to mine, I started to sweat. At fifteen, I was extremely nervous. At eighteen, I was in a panic, and when they had read all twenty songs and none of mine were on the list, I sat there in shocked disbelief.

Numbly, I allowed my husband to shepherd me out of the auditorium and onto the sidewalk. There were people all around. He asked me where I wanted to go, and I simply said, "anywhere but here."

We attended some of the classes during the festival. My ex-husband, a very talented electric guitarist, made it all the way to the finals in instrumental competition and placed third overall. But my week had been over before it even started. In many ways, it seemed my life was over.

Prior to the competition, I had regularly been angry with God for not allowing me enough time to do my full-time job, take care of my house and husband, fulfill my church responsibilities, and write and record songs the way I wanted to. I really, truly believed God had created me expressly for the purpose of writing Christian songs and felt like I was being asked to do an impossible task considering my circumstances.

That first night at the festival, everything changed. I knew that if God had really wanted me to be a Christian songwriter, I would have been in the semifinals. Suddenly everything I believed about myself and my purpose was turned upside down.

I was numb and depressed for months. I didn't know what to think. I felt washed up. Over. Dead.

No one at my church could believe what had happened to me. But what had happened was that I, used to being a big fish in a small pond, was thrown into an ocean full of much bigger fish than me, and suddenly I just wasn't so special.

Finally, I threw my energy into a new determination to go back to the GMA Seminar and kick some butt. I did a much better job of writing and recording three songs. That first night of the second festival, I breathed a sigh of relief when I was one of the twenty semifinalists. I placed twelfth overall out of hundreds of songs, and that was quite an accomplishment.

But the judges weren't satisfied with my song. Listening to their critiques, and learning more about the supposed craft of songwriting during classes that week, I began to understand the formula for songs that can sell. And that's what it's all about, in secular or Christian music. It has to sell.

I went home, and tried to write songs that would sell.

But my heart just wasn't in it. I wanted to express myself in a way that made sense to me, and I quickly came to realize that anything less would be selling out. Yes, I was technically capable of writing the way Nashville wanted. But something had happened during the year or so since that first shocking night.

I had grown some backbone. I had started believing I mattered, because it seemed that I would never receive that confirmation from outside myself, not to the endless extent that I needed it. And I began to see that if fame amongst the members of my church wasn't enough to satisfy my need, nothing would ever be enough.

I went into a metamorphosis that would ultimately result in my leaving Christianity and finding Buddhism. It would result in my leaving my husband and finding another. And it would result in my seeing myself as myself, judged by my own standards, and not by what I thought others believed about me.

So. It took over three decades of my life before I was able to let go and just be me.

Now, as a Dharma practitioner, I have learned that fame is a worldly concern -- something that distracts us from our true purpose. And I believe that to be completely true. When self-grasping and self-cherishing are abandoned, there is no need to seek fame. Needing to seek fame for our own self-gratification is poisonous and distracting. And I'm so glad I don't have that need anymore!

I do think it's important to say that there's nothing wrong with fame in and of itself. Many Dharma teachers and gurus, for example, are famous. This does not make them fraught with worldly concern. They use their fame only to help others, and their fame enlarges their audience and makes them more credible. So it is not wrong to want fame -- it is wrong to want it for the wrong reasons.

In our celebrity-worshiping culture, fame is seen as the be-all end-all by many. And with low self-worth as rampant as it is in our culture, it is hardly surprising that people will grab onto any chance at fame that they can get. Witness reality TV "stars," and the like. I suspect some people even commit crimes just so they can enjoy their "five minutes of fame."

The solution to this isn't to get rid of the reality TV shows (although that's not a bad idea). The solution is for people to see themselves as they really are -- see the gold buried in the field of their consciousness for what it truly is -- see themselves as intrinsically good and worthwhile.