Vachon Imagined

My son was a big Taylor Swift fan for many years—well, who isn’t at some point? I can see her beauty, her talent, and what an extraordinary businesswoman she is. But when admiration tips into idolatry, something subtle begins to happen: a person stops being seen in their totality and becomes a projection of how they make you feel.

Idolatry is not simply admiration. It is when an idea of someone becomes fixed. You begin to relate not to the full, changing reality of a human being, but to a curated emotional experience—how they sound, how they look, how they fit what you need in the moment.

In that fixation, you stop seeing the person and start consuming the feeling they generate in you.

This is also the machinery of fame and marketing: to place something in front of you that holds your attention so completely that you forget yourself, and sometimes forget the humanity of the person being presented. We are invited into a relationship with an image that no human being can actually sustain.

No one can live as an image. Not even the most famous, the most polished, the most adored. Everything is temporary—attention, fame, admiration, even the roles people occupy in the public mind. What is constructed will eventually shift or dissolve, whether in a lifetime or after it.

So when we look at one another through a more grounded lens, we can still appreciate beauty, talent, and even feel momentary joy or inspiration. We can receive a compliment, or experience admiration without rejecting it. But we do not lose ourselves in it.

We do not turn what is temporary into something absolute. We do not confuse what is felt with who someone is. And we do not confuse what someone evokes in us with the full truth of who they are.