Fake Fame

Much of Emily Gould's article about her life as a professional blogger doesn't seem similar at all to my life, but her description of the odd phenomenon of quasi-fame that comes from being a blogger has some resonance with me:

I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in line at Balthazar’s coffee bar, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. “Emily, don’t quit Gawker!” a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or looking at the stain on my sweater or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was.

It's a pretty weird phenomenon, though since I've been doing this blog for over six years now (over 22+ percent of my life!) I've gotten used to it. People sometimes come up to me in bars, Metro stations, etc. and introduce themselves as if I were a real celebrity which is always flattering but then again it makes me worry that I'm somehow not living up to the blog persona or something.