When success starts to erase you

This is what happens when your old identity becomes the thing you must escape.

Before we go deep, let’s play a game.

Oh, c’mon, it’ll be fun! I’ll say some names, and you respond (in your head) with the first movie character that comes to mind. Got it? Here we go…

Al Pacino.

Macaulay Culkin.

Mark Hamill.

Jon Heder.

Christopher Reeve.

OK, if you said…

• Al Pacino → Tony Montana from Scarface

• Macaulay Culkin → Kevin McCallister from Home Alone

• Mark Hamill → Luke Skywalker from Star Wars

• Jon Heder → Napoleon Dynamite from Napoleon Dynamite

• Christopher Reeve → Clark Kent from Superman

…good job!

And if the answers came fast, awesome. But also: Kind of chilling.

So many of these famous names spent years building their public persona — only to realize later, often too late, that it has become a cage. And this doesn’t just happen in Hollywood.

• In music, Vanilla Ice is the “Ice Ice Baby” guy, even though he’s tried to lean into more hardcore rap.

• In the creator economy, PewDiePie is the loud gamer YouTuber, no matter what else he does.

• In self-help, Tim Ferriss is “The 4-Hour Workweek” guy, despite doing and being so much more.

Ferriss himself mused openly about his long podcasting career:

“You start by feeding the machine through the cage, only to wake up one day and realize that you’re the one inside the cage.”

That line haunts me — for reasons that’ll make sense later.

Once the world decides what you are, it shoves you into a box. Which makes you start to wonder…

What happens when you try to pivot after building — intentionally or accidentally — around one thing in your career?

What happens when you want to change from the thing people know you for or expect you to be?

Well, we already know what happens.

Some never escape the cage.

Look at Macaulay Culkin.

Culkin skyrocketed to fame in 1990 with Home Alone, becoming one of the biggest child stars ever. His role was iconic, but it also froze him in time. He was cemented in the public’s mind as Kevin McCallister, the adorable child monster who concocted all sorts of twisted, painful-looking booby traps, even long after Culkin had grown up.

Culkin tried to escape and pivot into more mature acting. He took a darker role in The Good Son, playing a (non-ironic) child psychopath. But it flopped. Critics panned it. The Washington Post wrote that his casting seemed “to throw the whole film out of whack, making the picture play more like an inadvertent comedy than a thriller.” One movie-goer wrote, “Kevin McCallister as a villain?! WHY?!?”

Message received, loud and clear: People didn’t want him to change.

Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio or Jodie Foster — who successfully transitioned from child stars to serious actors — Culkin never fully escaped Kevin McCallister. Over time, he stopped trying.

But why does this happen? Why do we do this to people?

Four words: Thanks a lot, brain.

Our brains just crave shortcuts. It’s easier to label someone as that one thing than to keep updating our perception of them. That’s why your mom still thinks you’re the same now as you were when you were 12.

Psychologists call this the halo effect, which is when one standout trait overshadows everything else about a person. If you’re famous for playing one role, running one company, or making one viral hit, congratulations! That’s now all people see.

And once that label sticks, another little quirk of the brain called confirmation bias kicks in, where we search for the very things that already confirm what we already believe — and ignore anything that contradicts it. That’s why we want people to stay in their lane. We expect them to.

And really, that’s where the problems begin. Because it’s not just that people forget you’re capable of more. It’s that they actively reject the idea.

It’s almost funny if you stop and think about how unintentionally merciless we can be. How easy it is for us to define someone by one character in a movie. One company. One meme. One viral moment. It’s as if the world clings to that one thing and somehow twists it into the ultimate defining characteristic of who you are and what you’re capable of from now ‘til forever and ever.

And if you try to change? NO, God forbid. The world resists. They doubt. They mock. And if you keep going?

They abandon you.

The real problem isn’t being good at something and having people love it. The real problem isn’t even that you might stop making money if you try to be something else and do something new.

No, the real problem — the deep horror, I think — is feeling stuck.

Stuck in your past endeavors, achievements, and identities. Stuck in this endless loop of “Is this it?” Stuck being only that thing, even when you want to move beyond it.

And then another part of your brain kicks in and you wonder: Isn’t it just practical? Because hey, if you’re making money, if your audience is still there, if your brand is strong — why bother doing something new? Cash that check and live your life, right?

Sure, it’s practical. Logical even.

But at some point, staying in the cage is worse than leaving it.

If you’ve ever spent time building something — heck, even just worked a job for a while — you know the feeling. At first, it’s exciting. Then it’s comfortable. And then one day, it’s suffocating.

You know that repeating the same thing doesn’t just stall your career, it hollows you out. If it gets bad enough, you start to feel like an NPC in your own life. Eventually, you want more. Not because you have to, but because staying the same starts to feel like slow, excruciating death.

Then the answer is obvious…

CHANGE!

QUIT!

GO FOR BROKE!

Yes, but… therein lies the kicker: Breaking out comes with a price.

When you pivot, you don’t just risk failure. You risk losing everything you’ve built.

If you’ve built an audience, you risk alienating the very audience that built you. They turn away not out of spite but because they signed up for one thing — and now you’re doing something else.

If you switch lanes, the algorithm doesn’t know what to do with you anymore. Are you an amateur K-pop singer or a tech reviewer?

And because the core within is deeply tied to identity, you start to doubt yourself: Is this a mistake? Should I have just stuck to the same thing?

But the scariest part isn’t the doubt.

It’s the silence that follows when you’ve stepped outside your old world and no one else is there to give you applause. When it’s just you alone — and this version of yourself you hope is real — trying to survive the in-between.

That’s why so many people stay stuck.

That’s why Macaulay Culkin stopped trying. That’s why some musicians stick to the same sound. That’s why many creators keep going even when they’re exhausted (or hate their own work). Easier to play it safe when the cost of pivoting is so high that most people would rather stay trapped in a cage than risk stepping outside of it.

But some people do break out.

Plenty of gutsy people have rewritten the script. And to see how, we only need to look at comedian horror filmmaker Jordan Peele. Few have done it better.

For years, Jordan Peele was best known as one half of Key & Peele, the long-running sketch comedy series that blended satire with absurdity (“And I said *looks around* biiiiiiiiiiiiit-chh….”). Peele was a brilliant comedian, but that’s all the world saw him as, myself included.

Then one day, in 2017, he made what everyone expected him to make the LEAST. And that moment was the turning point of his entire career — and identity.

Peele shocked the world with Get Out, a total departure from his comedy-based work. Get Out was a horror film. One that was commercially and culturally a super-smash hit, and generally regarded as genre-defying.

Instead of announcing his pivot and hoping Hollywood would hand him the opportunity, Peele had been quietly shaping Get Out for years. He wove his lived experiences into it, using his sharpened intuition for comedic timing and social commentary to craft something entirely new. Originally, he was hired to just screenwrite, but Sean McKittrick of Donnie Darko fame believed in his vision and brought him fully onboard to direct.

And so, Peele stepped into a completely new identity — and the world followed, not the other way around. He’d successfully escaped. Today, Jordan Peele isn’t just a comedian-turned-horror-director. He’s a highly respected horror filmmaker.

Unlike Culkin, Peele’s reinvention worked because he controlled the shift and let the work speak for itself. Culkin’s reinvention failed due to three reasons:

1. Never fully steered his reinvention: He did take darker serious roles, but none framed his transition in a way that helped audiences accept him.

2. Let others define him: He became Kevin McCallister forever because he never built a new identity strong enough to override it.

3. Reacted to the industry instead of shaping his path: After his early struggles, he faded away instead of actively forcing a reinvention.

The throughline is simple: Taking control is everything. Specifically, narrative control is everything.

And that brings me to my last-ever PR-related lesson:

Narrative control isn’t just for brands. It’s for people — all of us.

You can’t outrun bad PR and just hope it goes away. Brands and companies (and actors and musicians and creators – anyone) sometimes watch their public perception spin out of control because they let it; or they remain reactive.

Smart PR is about framing, taking things people say that you may not like and owning them as positive traits (or a compass for growth). It’s not about being defensive and trying to minimize what IS already being said, but being proactive and leading with a new narrative.

Macaulay Culkin lost control of the narrative, and others defined him — both Hollywood and the audience. It’s not all a total sob story, though, as he eventually returned to acting and took on roles that better aligned with him.

Peele’s story is proof that public perception doesn’t have to define you forever. But narrative control shouldn’t always need to take years or decades. Because most of us don’t have that kind of time.

Speaking of which… that brings things back to me (and you).

The story of Peele, the story of Culkin… It was all framing, a setup — and maybe you already saw this coming, you clever reader you — because this is exactly what’s happening with me and this newsletter (now on Substack).

In my PR agency, I used to help people control their public perception. Over the years, I noticed a pattern over and over again. Of people who felt trapped by their own success. Creators who wanted to pivot but feared losing their audience. Entrepreneurs who wanted to escape their own brand. And I’d tell them the same thing I’m telling you now:

Reinvention is possible, but it doesn’t rely on luck. It’s a choice, a process, a fight — just like anything else.

That’s why I’m making one myself, starting with this essay.

I’m no longer that PR & media strategist who helps launch authors to best-seller status or turn creators into hosts of their own Netflix or HBO shows. That was never truly me.

If I’ve learned anything from working with people who felt trapped in their own success, it’s that reinvention isn’t always just a luxury.

Sometimes it’s survival.

After all, it’s easy to keep doing what works. It’s easy to let the public or some algorithm decide who you are. It’s easy to stay in a cage if the world keeps rewarding you for it.

But what’s easy isn’t always what’s worth it in the end.

I’ve spent years helping others escape their own cages — helping them craft a public image, control their narrative, and define themselves before the world could do it for them. But I never got to do that for myself.

Until now.

I’m taking my own advice. Taking that narrative control.

The world won’t let you change unless you make them see you differently.

So that’s what signal versus self is: The end of me staying invisible. The end of giving all my ideas to other people to run with. The end of standing just outside the frame.

It’s me coming full-circle back to my creative writing core.

Some readers have followed me for over a decade. Some know I’ve written all sorts of articles across industries like wellness, video games, entrepreneurship, money, and more — across publications like The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, and more. But somewhere along the way, I had put myself in a cage and made myself disappear.

This is my re-emergence.

Soooo…what’s next?

I have some ideas. Still figuring out others. And I’ll let them unfold in real time.

But what I do know now: Answers come best to me when I write my way into them.

signal versus self is the place to do just that. It’s my dual-platform space (here on Substack and on YouTube) to create freely and follow my curiosity, wherever it leads.

Sometimes that means essays exploring the internet, media, and all the ways we make sense of the world. Other times, it’s about identity, expectations, the weird ways we change (or don’t). Mostly, it’s about whatever’s on my mind — things I like, things I question, and things that make me stop and go hmmmmm…

This newsletter is the companion to my YouTube channel, which features long-form essays that sometimes expand on ideas here, but often go in a completely new direction.

The essays will evolve. The ideas will evolve. And that’s the whole point.

This won’t be for everyone, and I don’t intend it to be. But if you’ve ever felt trapped in an identity that no longer fits, if you’ve ever questioned what’s next, if you’ve ever wanted to escape the cage the world put you in, then maybe this could be your kind of thing.

Welcome to signal versus self… just remember to take your shoes off.

Originally sent to email subscribers with a personal intro — edited for clarity and flow on the site.