Elita Drāke on the dark side of public life: "We pay for everything in life"
Healthy-lifestyle enthusiast and author Elita Drāke says fame has come at a personal cost, describing how both she and her son have coped with public attention.
In the 1188.lv talk series "Un tā tas sākās," healthy-lifestyle enthusiast and book author Elita Drāke spoke about the less visible side of being a public figure. She says choosing a public life means giving up part of one's privacy, adding that in life people pay for everything — for their mistakes as well as their naivety.
Her son struggled with her fame
Drāke says her recognition has affected her son the most. He found it difficult to understand why his mother was well known and why other people talked about her, and the situation reportedly caused him discomfort and confusion.
Balancing the spiritual and the material
The author explains that she deliberately chose not to remain solely within the spiritual world she once inhabited. Instead, she combined interests such as meditation, philosophy and psychology with dancing, competitions and enjoying the material world. She believes the key is finding balance between the two, and that knowledge gained through life experience can help both oneself and others.
A year and a half in the forest
To determine whether she truly needed public life, Drāke once spent a year and a half living in a forest, completely away from public attention. That experience later helped her accept recognition as part of her life, since working, sharing knowledge and wanting to help others cannot be fully reconciled with withdrawing from public life altogether.
Drāke also acknowledges that over the years she has faced negativity and slander, but says she has adopted a simple strategy for dealing with it: not reading comments about herself.
