to the stars and back

If you remember Jonathan Brandis without having to Google him, this piece is probably for you.I do. I remember the face, the hair, the way he seemed to exist for a very brief moment and then vanished. The same with River Phoenix. Not as trivia. As presence. As loss, even though I never knew them. And that is probably the first clue that this isn’t about celebrities at all, but about time, and about what we notice when we get older.

Because some stories don’t end. They just stop being watched. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, watching how we talk about Britney now. Not the Free Britney years, when her pain came with a mission and a hashtag, but now. When she is free and unsettled and repetitive and uncomfortable. When the tone has shifted from concern to ridicule, from activism to silence. It feels eerily familiar. I remember the same tone around Amanda Bynes. Around Aaron Carter. Around Corey Feldman, who kept talking (still is) long after people stopped listening.

And I keep seeing the same pattern repeat, no matter the decade or the genre. We like to pretend child stardom is a talent story. A luck story. A fairy tale with a few rough chapters. But it isn’t. It is a family systems story wrapped in glitter. It is about what happens when a child becomes the emotional or financial centre of a household. Psychology calls it parentification. The roles reverse. The child carries the adults. And no one panics, because the money is coming in and everyone looks fine in photos.

Success becomes proof that nothing is wrong.

That is usually where protection ends.

This is the part where the distance between their stories and mine collapses a little. I know what it feels like to grow up too early. To be the one who holds things together. To be alert long before adulthood requires it. To learn very young that stability is something you provide, not something you receive. The scale is different, the spotlight absent, but the mechanism is the same. When a child becomes useful, they stop being protected.

When I line up the names that struggled to cross over, Britney, Aaron Carter, Amanda Bynes, Jonathan Brandis, Corey Feldman, I don’t see weakness. I see children who grew up without armour. Identity formed too early, frozen around a role they didn’t choose. Erik Erikson (psychoanalyst) had a term for it: identity foreclosure. You become something before you’ve had the chance to become yourself. When the role collapses, so do you.

What we call erratic behaviour is often just a nervous system finally reacting to years of containment.

And then there are the others. The ones who crossed over. Drew Barrymore, Ethan Hawke, Jodie Foster, Natalie Portman, Dakota Fanning, Leelee Sobieski. Their paths were not easy, just different. What they had was either structure, or the brutal courage to build it themselves when no one else would. Barrymore’s story matters here, because she had no safe family to fall back on. Survival came from refusal. From leaving. From choosing distance over loyalty. From entering treatment as a teenager and rebuilding herself without a safety net. That kind of survival is quieter, and rarer, and often misunderstood. Sometimes protection does not come from being held, but from walking away. In other cases, it meant someone was there who was willing to lose money. Someone who insisted on school, on distance, on disappearing for a while. Someone who treated a child like a person instead of a product.

And there is another uncomfortable commonality: intellect. Not brilliance, not genius, just the ability to think beyond the room you are in. To know this is a job. To know there is a world outside the script. Books, education, boredom, privacy. All the things fame tries to steal first.

I recognise this too. The inner life. The place you retreat to when the outside becomes too loud. The quiet thinking that keeps something intact even when circumstances do not.

It’s not virtue. It’s scaffolding.

What unsettles me is how we, the audience, participate in this cycle. We love liberation. We love the moment someone is freed. We yell, we share, we feel good. And then we vanish when freedom looks messy. When healing is not linear. When it repeats, loops, embarrasses us.

Aaron Carter was mocked until he died. Britney is mocked now that she is free. Justin Bieber is watched with a mix of concern and irritation, as if trauma should be tidy if you are rich.

Mental illness is only supported when it performs redemption. Maintenance is boring. And boring does not trend.

There is something darkly funny about noticing who we name when we talk about this. Brandis. Phoenix. Feldman. If those names still sting, you are probably my age. If they mean nothing, that is also the point. Fame is a half-life shorter than memory. The system moves on. The damage does not.

I think that is why this matters. Not because I want to rescue anyone, but because once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it. Celebrity news stops being entertaining. It starts looking like sociology. Like psychology. Like a long experiment we keep running because it is profitable.

But let’s be clear: Hollywood does not destroy children. Neglect does. And neglect wears many disguises: ambition, pride, money, admiration, silence. The success stories are not proof the system works. They are proof that someone stepped in, or that someone stepped away in time. And maybe that line, more than anything exposes my age and my line of work. Not the faces we remember, but the systems we can no longer unsee.