This is probably go into topic of niche psychological whump and personal dump but pls keep reading I assure you it worth it (cat man related too)
Making history is very lonely endeavor
I just wonder now what it feel like to be big name person. What do nobel laureate feel when people stop asking dumb question they willing to answer because they got the damn nobel? Do professor feel lonely after attending award ceremony and come back finding their student stop making a joke or drop friendly snarky comment? When people freak out because I tell them I used to work in national lab and did carve my name into small corner of aerospace industry history because they asking about it?
Sometimes when people know what I do they treat me less like a human and more like a computer. To be the part of the team that do something for the first time in the history doesn't make me some kind of untouchable technobabble blob or make me mensa einstein genius level. Im just some guy, the same stupid silly guy before I made all that happened. I also doesn't feel like anything change aside from adding extra line in my resume and extra paragraph in my eulogy when I died. My raging Larsen level of imposter syndrome still eating up my brain resource all the same
I do wonder if people working in frontier research, people who discovered new things, people who did what no one do before and people who got big award stuff got this same treatment everywhere, or is it just me
Do cat man getting lonely being the first and only CRISPR hybrid human animal person in the world? Do his student stop bickering with him when he return with big name award for making deadly cancer less deadly? Do Larsen twitter getting more silent after he landed front page for reinvent alphafold? Will lab mate still toss bag of bean at him when he crunching coding on the floor?
Now imagine your subject being known for what they are doing that is a good thing. Maybe even can use whatever they gain during the bad time with to their advantage and is very good at it. Or just simply climbing back from rock bottom to high achievement. But end up being put on pedestal instead of just being yet another normal person who do the thing. The same isolation, the same loneliness, the same emptiness. The same expectation , the same demanding, the same pristine image, the same feeling of you cannot be weak, the new "you must get your shit together because lot of people look up to you".
It get even worse if there are no support system, the compatible sibling is too busy doing their own thing, the non compatible sibling who doesn't care, parent doesn't always understand, friend either falling off when you breaking yourself chasing achievement or just simply forget you exists after you drop off the face of the earth, friend that jettison you like empty SRB casing when they finished reap off benefits from you. There are no haunting feeling more than the feeling of being so alone surrounded by so many people
And this time there are no handler, there are nothing they can do about it, it's the world choose to treat them that way simply because they achieves
Being pioneer is a lonely endeavor
And sometimes it isn't even a choice
I doesn't regret what Im doing
I just very fucking lonely right now