Gooood morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

This is an image of my mustachioed face as Chappell Roan, who's been publicly struggling with fame of late, which reminded me of something.

Do you have an all time least favorite picture of yourself? I do, it's this one. This is a picture of me at the premiere of the movie adaptation of my book Paper Towns, when I was absolutely on top of the world and making tons of money and more famous than any novelist has a right to be. But as you can maybe tell from the picture if you look at it closely, I am also in the middle of a true blue panic attack. My shirt and face are drenched in sweat. I'm absolutely terrified of the cameras, and in general, I just feel wildly overexposed and extremely, extremely scared.

Alright, so this is a high quality image I worked up of Fame Mountain. At the beginning in 2002, when I was writing my first novel, I was hungry, hiking up the Mountain, thinking about how great it would be to make it to the top. Then later, when I started to have some success, but still saw lots of people further up the mountain than me, I began to think that, like, making it to the top of the mountain was essentially the point of life. I mean, I wanted to be at the top of the mountain more than I wanted to be, like, happy or fulfilled. And then, improbably, I made it to the top of the mountain. I mean, Saturday Night Live made a sketch making fun of my book, TIME Magazine named me one of the world's most influential people. At one point, I remember a movie studio executive saying to me, “you're absolutely blowing up”–and it felt that way.

The thing you have to remember about being on top of a mountain is that one, it can be quite lonely, and two, there's not much oxygen up there. So listen, proper fame is definitely not the worst thing I've ever experienced, not by a long shot, but it is the worst purportedly good thing I've ever experienced. Tony Hawk said that he'd tried all of the major drugs and that fame was the worst one. Even Mister Rogers once said that fame is a four-letter word and then paused for a long time before adding, like "love".

And my experience is that fame is very much an intoxicant. It's intoxicating to be at parties with lots of famous people. It's intoxicating to receive so much outside affirmation. But there are also some downsides to intoxicants, of course. And for me, one of those downsides was that, yeah, lots of people liked my work, but also, lots of people didn't like it. And some people, in fact, defined themselves in part by disliking my work or even disliking me. And for me, at least, negative feedback just penetrates in a way that positive feedback doesn't, like, I remember almost nothing that anyone's ever said to me that was positive. I remember a lot of things that people have said that were negative.

Also, I didn’t really understand the pleasure of privacy until I didn't have it anymore. Like, you know how in middle school it’s really common to believe that everyone is paying attention to you and thinking about you and judging you? But then eventually you realize, nah, everybody’s too busy thinking about themselves to think about me. Except that when you’re famous, they actually are thinking about you. Like, if you’re in a restaurant and lots of people are watching you eat, they’re forming an opinion of you. They’re having the only interaction they’ll likely ever have with you and they’re making conclusions from that interaction, as anyone would. Like, I remember once a friend said to me, "A buddy of mine saw you at dinner and said you were a very deliberate chewer". Now, as it happens, I am a very deliberate chewer because I have eosinophilic esophagitis, and I don't want food to get stuck in my esophagus, but that's not something I want strangers noticing while I'm eating. 

In fact, in general, I don't enjoy being observed by strangers nearly as much as I thought I would when I was walking up the Mountain. Now, listen, I understand that this is well beyond a first world problem. It is a zeroth world problem. But still, it's a problem for Chappell Roan. It was, and to some extent, still is a problem for me. It's a problem for almost all famous people I know, except for a very few who can navigate fame with true grace and embrace the responsibilities that come with it. And it's a problem because as a culture, we sort of worship at the altar of fame. I also want to be clear that I like it when people come up to me and tell me that they like my work or that it's been helpful for them. That's lovely. I've gotten much better at taking that in and taking it seriously and also, I'm really grateful if I can improve someone's day by something as simple as taking a selfie.

What I didn't like was feeling overwhelmed and overexposed and scared, and like all of my nerve endings were on the outside of my body. And I don't feel that way as much these days, partly because I've done a lot of work and partly because I'm on the other side of the Mountain, which could maybe be a topic for its own video down the road. But for now, I've come to understand that how I feel about fame is mostly a function of how I use fame. Like when I felt trapped and terrified when this picture was taken, I didn't know what to do with fame other than what I'd been told to do with it, which is just try to make more of it for as long as you can. But now I know there's lots of other things I can do with it. I can use fame to, for instance, write a book about tuberculosis, even though I know there will be no Saturday Night Live sketches that result from it because I think it can be helpful for people and because it's what my deepest self wants to do. I can use fame to connect with people and make their days a little better. I can even use fame to do silly and wondrous things like Pizzamas.

So ultimately, I think Mister Rogers was right. Fame is a four-letter word. And like with other four-letter words, it's all about how you use it. Hank, the end of Pizzamas is nearly upon us. As the poet wrote, dawn goes down today, and even Pizzamas can't stay. So get your Pizzamas while it's still available at pizzamas.com. 

Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.