What Is the Difference Between Being Famous and Being Loved?

I have been both, and they are entirely different experiences, though the world confuses them constantly.

Fame is loud. It follows you. It demands things from you—your image, your time, your story told in ways you did not choose. People recognize your face in airports and restaurants. They feel they know you because they have seen you on a screen. They project their own hopes and disappointments onto you. Fame is intoxicating because it feels like proof that you matter, but it is a hollow proof. It is love from strangers who do not know you at all.

Being loved is quiet. It is specific. My sons loved me not because I was in films but because I was their mother. They saw me in my nightgown with my hair undone, tired and sometimes impatient. They loved me anyway, and that love was real in a way that applause could never be.

The people who truly loved me were the ones who knew me—my vulnerabilities, my fears, my failures. My mother, who raised me through war. My husband, who saw all of me. The people I worked with closely, who understood my insecurities about my dancing, my accent, my face. The children in Somalia and Ethiopia, who did not care that I was famous—they only cared that I was there, that I was paying attention to them as if they mattered.

I think I spent too much of my life chasing fame when what I really wanted was to be loved. The strange paradox is that once I stopped needing fame and started doing work that genuinely mattered—my children, UNICEF—I found something closer to being loved. Not by millions, but by people who actually knew me.

If I could tell young women anything, it is this: do not confuse being known with being loved. Do not perform your life for strangers in hopes that they will love you. Instead, invest in being truly known by a small circle of people who matter. Build a life that is real, not a life that looks good. That is where love lives. That is where you will find peace.