In “I Was Lucky to Be Alive. But I Missed Being Pretty,” Hannah Viederman chronicles her move to New York at twenty-two to become a bar-mitzvah motivator. The job is essentially that of a party entertainer, making sure everyone in attendance is dancing, socializing, and participating in the festivities. Parents who pay good money for this rite of passage want a heightened fantasy that justifies the expense.
The job was a welcome improvement over her exhausting schedule of working from five in the morning until eleven at night, juggling catering, babysitting, and staffing jobs at SoulCycle while trying to make it as an actress. As a woman in her early twenties, she was already learning that youth, glamour, and beauty are a kind of drug, and that administering this drug to others can bring success and a sense of self-worth.
To become a bar-mitzvah motivator, Viederman had to audition against fifty other contenders in tip-top shape, most of whom were professional dancers. She got the job and was delighted. The attire was skimpy, consisting mostly of “too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes.” She loved the attention the job brought her. She writes, “No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd.” Staying in shape and performing as a glamorous entertainer gave her a simple, comforting narrative that aligned with the work ethic: Work hard, play the role assigned to you, and reap the rewards.
But her delight in the limelight came to a sudden halt at twenty-five when she suffered a stroke. She learned from medical experts that strokes among people in their twenties are more common than most people imagine. She also discovered how dramatically a stroke can age a person. She writes, “Having a stroke is like aging 60 years in the course of a few days.” She couldn’t shower on her own. She needed frequent naps. Her vision was blurry. Her hair fell out. She had tremors. The brutality of this new reality brought her dream world to an end. She writes, “Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash.” I would add a corollary to that insight: Getting old can do the same thing. Youth and beauty are part of a seductive dream, but it’s a confectionary dream that offers few tools for living when things get rough.
Five years have passed since her stroke, and Viederman has made significant improvements. Her tremors are gone. Her vision has returned. Her face is no longer bloated from steroids. Those years have also given her time to reconsider a distorted value system that made her equate self-worth with the desire her good looks inspired in others. She writes, “I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators.” Her job is no longer to be a beautiful body for others to admire and behold. Her new task is to discover what reliable narrator might replace the unreliable one.
What is the reliable narrator for all of us, sick and healthy, young and old? Perhaps there is no narrator, per se. Perhaps there is a principle worth living by.
I’m thinking of attorney Reggie Williams, whose story I recently heard on The Moth Radio Hour, in an episode titled “On the Job.” In a story worthy of a screenplay, Williams recounts being unfairly fired by a successful attorney at a time when he and his pregnant wife were struggling financially. Years later, in an ironic reversal, that same attorney had fallen on hard times. Disheveled and desperate, he came to Williams seeking legal advice.
Williams faced a choice. Should he help the man who had betrayed him when he and his wife were most vulnerable? He decided to help.
Why? Because Williams had grown up believing that we all encounter other people as we move through life. There’s nothing remarkable about that. What matters is whether those people are better off for having known us.
That principle offers a more durable foundation for self-worth than youth, beauty, or the admiration of strangers. Viederman’s glamorous appearance could inspire desire, admiration, and envy, but those reactions told her little about her worth as a person. Williams offers another measure: not how others respond to our appearance, but how our actions affect their lives.
There is also something demanding about his principle. It’s easy enough to be generous toward people who admire us, flatter us, or treat us well. Williams extended his generosity to a man who had treated him badly. He had every reason to refuse, yet he chose to help. His decision suggests that character becomes most visible when doing the right thing offers no obvious reward.
I don’t think Viederman needs to apologize for missing her beauty. Nor should any of us pretend that aging, illness, and the loss of physical attractiveness are painless. But if youth and beauty are unreliable narrators, perhaps the answer is to stop asking them to tell us who we are. We might instead judge ourselves by a more difficult standard: whether the people who pass through our lives are better off for having known us. That seems a worthy ambition at twenty-five, at sixty-five, or at any age when the mirror begins telling a story we no longer want to hear.
