Last week, the best-selling author and motivational speaker Rachel Hollis self-immolated in the form of a now-deleted Instagram video that was about a lot of things, but mostly about whether or not you find her “relatable.”
After sharing a fan’s feedback that her hiring of a twice-weekly house cleaner (or as Hollis put it, someone who “cleans my toilets”) made her “unrelatable,” Hollis — as if momentarily forgetting that she is a very public figure — let her true feelings fly.
"What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable?” No, sis, literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can't relate to. Most people won't work this hard. Most people won't get up at 4 a.m. Most people won't fail publicly again and again just to reach the top of the mountain. Literally, every woman I admire in history was unrelatable. If my life is relatable to most people, I'm doing it wrong."
In her caption she listed a number of people she deemed “Unrelatable AF,” including Marie Curie, Malala Yousafzai, Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, and “RBG.” She really did this.
The questions about how this video even made it to the Internet — from Rachel’s brain, past her team, and straight onto the information superhighway — abound. Beyond the rank hypocrisy (Hollis had built a career on presenting herself as “just like you”), beyond the condescension, beyond the appropriative language (“no, sis”), beyond all of it, was a revealing statement of purpose, a life mission: to do everything in one’s power to achieve a life that is “unrelatable.”
A throwaway selfie video of bust-through-barriers, look-at-me positivity — a type of content which Hollis has made countless times in her career — had badly missed the target. And it had accidentally touched on a lot more.
Being extraordinary
The idea of fleeing from the faceless, nameless masses is hardly new or controversial. There’s even a pithy, shareable, startup-flavored Instagram quote for it: “Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.” The particulars of what others “can’t” do is absent, but it’s implied: stuff that they’d like to do, but can’t afford.
Maybe that’s why it’s hard to hear someone say that their purpose is to live a life “most people can’t relate to,” and not feel an immediate twinge of discomfort, like they just admitted something they shouldn’t have. Maybe that’s why, when they present a laundry list of ground-breaking women as their “unrelatable” heroes, you get the feeling that they missed the point, or that they might be strong-arming Nobel prizes and Supreme Court justices into a defense of craven careerism and calling it adoration and respect. That they think the most accomplished people in history are remembered mostly because they sought to be unrelatable, not because they were simply extraordinary.
Maybe to Hollis, this is an immaterial difference. Maybe she’s inspired to be unrelatable in the sense that, like her list of heroes, she wants to make a defining contribution to humanity at large — she merely wants to excel in a way most won’t. But in the context of a monologue about having a maid clean her toilets, it comes off a lot more like Hollis’ idea of being extraordinary is, well, having enough money to have people clean your toilet.
By stringing the toilet cleaning issue, and the subsequent “you’re unrelatable” comment, to “every woman I admire in history was unrelatable,” it starts to seem like in Rachel’s world, being wealthy, being extraordinary, and being “unrelatable,” are all sort of the same thing.
A waterfall of angry comments rained down upon Hollis in the hours and days following her post, only increasing in volume after a ham-fisted apology — if you can call it that — which called the way people interpreted her post “ludicrous” and totally threw her employees under the bus (“I trusted my team, not my gut”). A final straw had broken the culturally appropriative camel’s back, and everyone had a grievance to air. And she really shouldn’t have brought Malala into it.
More than anything, Hollis had made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud. She hadn’t won a Nobel Prize, created a new industry, or made timeless art. She had built a career on saying she was just like you. And after being lifted up financially for years upon this humble premise, she had jarringly dropped the facade: she never wanted to be like you in the first place.
Staying human
This past weekend, a very different famous figure was in the news for a very different reason. The rapper DMX (born Earl Simmons) was, and continues to be as I write this, in a New York ICU bed, in critical condition after a drug overdose and subsequent heart attack.
It’s hard to convey the achievements of someone’s exceptional life through a few words and statistics, but with DMX, it’s easier than most, since he’s one of just fourteen musical acts in history to release multiple No. 1 albums in the same year, and one of just a handful of artists, and the only rapper, to start their career with five No. 1 albums in a row. He also happens to be one of the best-selling artists of all-time, having sold more than 23 million records over the course of his career. And that’s all despite a childhood marred by physical abuse, neglect, abandonment, and drug addiction, and an adulthood encumbered by the destructiveness of their residual effects.
He is a larger-than-life generational talent, a musical legend, and a worldwide household name. He is not, in the way I at least assume Rachel Hollis understands the word to mean, “relatable.” He is extraordinary.
As tends to happen in these moments, when we are gut-wrenchingly reminded of even our idols’ mortality, the online tributes immediately started to flow. But for X, the deluge of memories had a thread of intimacy and familiarity that was beyond the norm.
Fans and acquaintances alike painted pictures that weren’t crisp and clean, like the manicured image of a celebrity taken from a distance. These were stories with yellowed, roughened edges that you could touch and feel. More than anything, the stories were human. Maybe not so surprising, for the rapper people often likened to a fire-breathing preacher.
One person wrote, of sharing a flight with X from NYC to Greenville: “He flopped into the seat beside, introduced himself, asked what tunes I had lined up since my Beats were around my neck. I told him Jimi Hendrix. I offered my splitter. He plugged in. We jammed a few songs and talked the rest of the way!”
Another Twitter user told a story of he and his friends losing $300 to X in a series of pool games at a packed bar, then all joining the rapper’s crew after the bar had closed, first racing RC cars in an empty parking garage, then ultimately all enjoying an inebriated breakfast at a late-night diner. One Redditor shared a story of having a flat tire at a gas station late at night, and X wandering over to offer his phone and to help look for a jack. Hip-hop podcasters ItsTheReal talked about growing up 10 minutes from X, seeing him buying pizzas for kids outside the courthouse when he was there to deal with (apparently a constant string of) traffic offenses.
Referring to the Yonkers-White Plains area where he is currently hospitalized, someone else wrote: “Everyone from 914 has a DMX story whether themselves or a friend they know. He’s really a legend in every sense of the term.”
One by one, each story seemed to reinforce the same theme: a megastar with the spirit of an everyman. That globe-trotting, multi-platinum-selling, dog-barking, chain-holding, Timberland-wearing New York City rapper, DMX? He loves to relate to people, actually. The everywoman self-help guru with the career built on being there for you? Not so much.
Confronting our narcissism
Among the many uncomfortable truths we don’t confront enough in this country is the beating pulse of narcissism that powers our culture, and how it affects our personal relationships.
We love to celebrate and lionize people who are brash, bold and unapologetic in our pop culture… and yet we hate to deal with them in real life. We put people on pedestals, expecting less of them than we would other humans, because we have made them super-human, untouchable, beyond reproach. We then forgive our own worst behaviors — selfishness, dishonesty, vanity — because they are merely the behaviors of our heroes. Because we made them so.
It should be no surprise that some of us grow up to act like Hollis. To see fame and notoriety as an end unto itself, to mistake a glamorous or wealthy life for a truly extraordinary one, to proudly proclaim to our adoring fans, the people who made us famous, that we aspire to be nothing like them. What is remarkable, what is extraordinary, is when someone turns out like DMX. When someone has every reason, from a gruesome childhood to a luxurious adulthood, to be distant, unreachable, callous — and forfeits it, choosing to be an authentic, relatable person instead.
On the popular podcast Drink Champs earlier this year, DMX said: “Always trust everyone to be themselves, but trust in the fact you can see them well… trust a snake to bite you, trust a liar to lie to you, trust a thief to steal from you.” His point being: it’s exhausting to invest energy into hoping people will be anything other than who they’ve repeatedly shown themselves to be.
Since her condescending rant went viral, Hollis has lost hundreds of thousands of followers — presumably folks who have decided they don’t need to have another person’s transparent desire to be better than them, to be above them, crudely shoved in their face. Maybe they didn’t like the laughing, the mocking, the talk of “cleaning toilets.”
Or maybe, they just started trusting Hollis to be herself.