A great many capable people were considered odd when they were young. Not disliked exactly, but set aside, treated as somebody who did not quite fit and was not going to. Children register this long before they can put words to it. And somewhere in that time a decision gets made, which is not experienced as a decision at all, and which shapes more of a life than anything chosen deliberately afterwards.
The decision is this. Become excellent at every single thing these people value, and then none of them will be needed. Build something so complete that nobody can look down on it, and having built it, be free. It sounds like strength, and for years everybody mistakes it for strength, including the person doing it. It is not strength at all. It is an answer to a conversation that ended long ago, and the answer goes on being given for the next twenty years to a room that has quietly emptied out.
And it does get built. That is worth saying, because there is no lesson in pretending these projects fail. They work exactly as designed, and the people who once looked past somebody come to admire them. The thing is flawless from every angle. And on the day the last piece goes in, very often, nothing is felt at all, and nobody understands why.
What an image asks for
An image is not a decoration, and that is what almost nobody understands going in. An image is a living thing that has to be fed every day, in every room, in front of every person, and it does not care whether anybody is tired or unwell or simply has nothing left. Once people have been shown a version of somebody that never falters, that version has to keep being produced. There is no day off, and there is no honest way to announce that the arrangement is over.
It also decides what a person may do. They cannot be unsure in public, because the image is sure. They cannot be unwell, because the image is capable. They cannot say they do not know something, because the image knows, and admitting otherwise would be a small collapse. Every one of those impossibilities seems harmless on its own, and together they build a wall, brick by brick, laid by the person inside it with some satisfaction at how straight the wall is.
Socrates said that every action has its pleasures and its price. The pleasures get counted very carefully, one by one, and the counting is enjoyed. The price is almost never sat down with and added up. And the price, as it turns out, is becoming a stranger to oneself so gradually that there is no single day on which it could have been noticed happening.
Perfection becomes a burden
The people who love somebody like this believe they are perfect, and that sounds like a good thing to have. It is not. When somebody believes you are perfect, there is nowhere in that relationship for you to be tired, or afraid, or wrong, or simply ordinary on a Wednesday. Their belief is a room with no chair in it. A person can stand in that room for hours, and cannot live there.
Nor can they be corrected, because correcting them would mean admitting that their impression has been managed all along. That feels like a worse confession than any of the flaws themselves, so nothing is said and it all stands. The perfection sits heavier every year, and the more people admire it the heavier it gets. Eventually something close to resentment appears towards the very people whose admiration was worked so hard for.
That is a strange and shameful thing to notice in oneself. It gets noticed, then explained away for a long time, and eventually it has to be accepted that the resentment was never aimed at them at all. It was aimed inward, and they simply happened to be standing in the way. Nobody asked for any of it to be built. They only responded to what was put in front of them, exactly as intended.
Coming out from behind it
There is no clean method for putting down an image, and anybody who offers one should be treated carefully. What can be observed is smaller. The moment somebody stops defending it, even in a very small way, even once, in front of one person, something eases in the chest that they had stopped noticing was tight. It is not comfort exactly. It is more like a window opening in a room they had assumed had no windows.
The first few times are frightening, and the fear is not irrational. Some people genuinely do prefer the image. They came for the image, and when it goes they go too, and that loss is real, and it should not be dressed up as painless. But the ones who stay after it goes are the only people who were ever actually in the room. Everybody else was in a room with a very well made thing that happened to carry somebody's name.
Most of these images were built to answer people who stopped watching decades ago. Some of those people are dead. Most of the rest would not remember the incidents that set the whole thing in motion, and would be genuinely puzzled to learn what they had started.
