The cost of pedestals we build

One of the more uncomfortable lessons I have been sitting with lately is the difference between admiration and idealisation.

For much of my life, I have placed people on pedestals. Because I genuinely saw the best in them.

I celebrated their wins as if they were my own. I shared their businesses. Recommended them. Bought tickets. Sent referrals. Spoke highly of them in rooms they would never enter. Defended them when they were misunderstood. Clapped the loudest when they succeeded.

And for a long time, I believed this was simply generosity.

What I am beginning to understand is that it can also be self abandonment.

When somebody occupies a pedestal, reciprocity becomes almost impossible because the relationship is no longer equal.

You stop asking whether they are showing up for you with the same energy you continuously offer them.

You excuse inconsistency, rationalise disappointment, tell yourself they are busy, tell yourself they probably did not see the post, tell yourself they meant to reach out and tell yourself they care, even when the evidence repeatedly suggests otherwise.

The reality is that reciprocity is not measured through grand gestures.

It is measured through small moments.

Who shares your work when you have shared theirs for years?

Who publicly celebrates your success when they privately tell you how proud they are?

Who checks in when life falls apart?

Who shows up when there is nothing to gain?

Who remembers your launch, your event, your book, your dream, your hard season?

Who makes space for your humanity rather than only enjoying your generosity?

Support behind closed doors has its place.

I am deeply grateful for the people who send private messages, offer encouragement, and cheer me on in ways nobody else sees.

But I have also learned that some people become very comfortable benefiting from your public support whilst offering only private acknowledgment in return.

They will tell you they adore what you do, how inspiring you are and how much they value you.

Yet somehow, when the opportunity arrives to publicly stand beside you, recommend you, advocate for you, or celebrate you, silence becomes their chosen language.

That silence teaches.

People don’t owe us promotion.

But kindness should never be transactional.

But because patterns reveal priorities.

I am incredibly guilty of this lesson.

Painfully so.

I have spent years assuming that if I loved people well enough, supported them enough, believed in them enough, the relationship itself would naturally become mutual.

It does not.

Some people will happily receive what you offer whilst never considering what they contribute in return.

It is simply information, and this particular information is powerful.

The older I become, the less interested I am in convincing people to see my value.

The less interested I am in overextending my energy in the hope of earning loyalty

The less interested I am in shrinking my disappointment to protect other people’s comfort.

Self reverence asks something entirely different of us.

It asks us to remove people from the pedestals we built with our own hands.

It asks us to stand beside them rather than beneath them.

It asks us to stop measuring our worth by who chooses us, supports us, notices us, or applauds us.

Most importantly, it asks us to reserve some of that extraordinary devotion for ourselves.

Because the woman who endlessly champions everyone else deserves to become one of the people she champions too.

And perhaps that is the lesson.

Not to harden, stop loving or to stop believing in people.

But to finally offer ourselves the same loyalty, advocacy, reverence, and unwavering support that we have so freely given away to everyone else.

And from that place, nobody gets the privilege of sitting on a pedestal above you ever again.