Life After Death
Fame I Didn’t Ask For
The moment I understood that life was going to be different was when I heard that his name was trending in Bangalore. I was sitting in a friend’s house in London in a confused haze, trying to clean up, to pack, to figure out what kind of plans I had to make. More and more people kept contacting me to tell me what I already knew, what Wikipedia had confirmed for me when I woke up that morning: the end date on my best friend and former lover’s life. But it was still just a personal tragedy until someone, I don’t remember who, told me about Bangalore.
After that, I knew the world was coming, and I had no idea how to meet it.
What happened next was this: the media made me famous for my lover’s death and the federal case that drove him to suicide.
Media likes to reduce you down to a moment, and then grow that moment to be the size of the sky, and this was what the life of Quinn Norton became that year. My moment was not such a good one to be trapped in.
By March of 2013, two months later, everyday was a new kind of hell. It wasn’t just the media storm, it was the fact of it all still sinking in. He’s never going to call me again. He’s never going to play with my kid again. He’s gone, gone, gone. It can’t be real, it’s some kind of awful joke. But all of that kept getting interrupted by op-eds, interview requests, the have-you-seen-this notes about paintings and conference talks and more interviews and articles. I told my side. I felt like I couldn’t get through a thought without someone somewhere pontificating about my life. I didn’t know how to make it. Most of my friends withdrew from me then, I think tired of the media storm, and I grieved alone. My loved ones didn’t want to talk about it. Strangers couldn’t talk about anything else. I thought sometimes I’d go mad. I needed a support group, but joked it was a support group that would never meet out of dread. Eventually, I just got through it, and I still don’t know how. I didn’t survive so much as I failed to die.
It got quieter. People passed judgement on my actions and stopped speaking to me, which was kind of nice, to be honest.
Other people accused me of somehow bringing this on out of a desire for fame — after all, didn’t all those who get famous somehow ask for it?
To this day people say things like “You shouldn’t define yourself this way” or “Just let it go, you make a big deal out of it.” That this is said in response to me talking about public criticism or exploitation of my life’s tragedy is generally lost on the speaker.
Life goes on, even when it makes no sense that it should, even when it seems like it’s over.
Over time the mentions receded. From hourly to daily, daily to weekly. Less than weekly now if I’m not going out much. It still gets mentioned by people fishing for traffic, which feels sleazy, but inevitable. I still get drive-by insults. Going to a new place socially is still sometimes a bit anxiety-ridden for me.
People meet me and sometimes they say “I know you from somewhere” in the tone of someone trying to remember meeting you. Then they realize that they know me from the story of Aaron’s death, and I know this because a look of awkward shock takes over their features. Other people have offered me condolences shortly after meeting me, and I get skittish with them. Sometimes they want to hug or just have a sympathetic emotional moment. I understand they mean well. I don’t get angry at them, at all. But at this point, one of the most difficult moments of my life is now the main link I have with this person who isn’t really part of my life, and I have no choice about it. I don’t want to let it, but the fact of the death being brought up will suddenly change my day. I probably think about Aaron almost everyday, but I don’t think about his death so often if I can help it. But suddenly, that can be what we’re doing — me and a stranger I am in the process of meeting — we’re thinking about my lover’s death.
It can throw off the rhythm of the workday.
It’s hard to have so many people, the vast majority of whom you will never know, have a staunchly held opinion on your own life tragedy. It’s hard to even think about, much less the days people decide that I should know what they think about the death of the man I loved and my place in his life.
I spend a lot of time telling people I don’t want to talk about Aaron. This is true, but it’s also not. I also spend a lot of time talking about him. He was a huge part of my life. We loved each other deeply and we helped each other grow and change in the years we had together. I have a ton of funny stories about Aaron. I still gripe about arguments we had that frustrated me. I remember how he comforted me when no one else could, and challenged me when no one else would. But the reasons I don’t want to talk about Aaron is that no one really wants to talk about Aaron with me. They want to talk about how Aaron died, or the case, or his depression, or the journals he downloaded. For me, these are the small parts of Aaron, but I can’t share the rest except with those who knew him like I did.
I don’t need to talk about his death or his prosecution anymore. The Aaron I carry around inside of me is the private living Aaron, not the dead public martyr.
Long before this all happened I was a reasonably well-known writer. People know my work on Occupy, or Anonymous. They often know about my work on bodyhacking, or my infosec journalism, considered some of the better work on the subject. Sometimes they even know me from my writing on social issues and how we can try to make them better.
But the truth is, most people who know me at all know me because my ex-boyfriend committed suicide. They know me because I was involved in the case that drove him to his death. They have read about me in one of those dozens of articles, or seen me in that movie. They sometimes recognize my face from one of the many pictures of me crying that float around the internet.
You may be one of the people who have formed opinions on my choices at some of the worst moments of my life. You might have theories about what Aaron and I did, sometimes with each other, at moments we never realized anyone else would ever know or care about. When you see someone at moments of intense emotion and consequence, it’s natural to feel like you know them, or at least know enough about them. But you don’t, because fame flattens as it takes. When you become famous, you become a public commodity, you cease to have the right to be a whole person. It doesn’t matter what made you famous, it doesn’t matter how much it hurts. Fame is a payment for which a public feels justified in taking anything.
Through the process of the last couple years I have changed. I have gained an unexpected empathy for real celebrities. I’m not having their experience, but certainly I have touched a facet of it, and found it cold and steely. I have learned that more than ever we, who now live on machines and networks, need to be softer. We need to rehumanize each other, even those who are distant and vague and a little bit famous, people about whom we can’t help but form an opinion.
Mostly I have learned that I don’t have the whole story when I see the moment media makes of people. I know they extend past that moment in infinite directions, bigger than the sky.
The dehumanizing interruptions of my particular fame have taught me a lot about the people we see through media, social and otherwise. Over the last couple of years I’ve realized we need to see people, where ever we find them, as human again. We need to suspend judgement. If not always of some action, then at least be gentle to the person behind it. I have become more gentle. I’m happy I have learned that from my unpleasant form of fame. I am happy at this one way it’s all made me a better person.
But I do still wish you’d all stop going on about it.
Your Fifteen ____ of Fame ← Previous ~~~ Next → Nobody Famous
The top image is from Cook Sip Go, and also why I don’t go to Brooklyn.
