LIVING LIFE TRUTHFULLY WITH LEBYANE Penny
C onsistently in the public eye, often labelled controversial, glamorous and always chic, Penny Lebyane, co-host of eTV’s Sunrise breakfast show, has retained her sparkling spontaneity despite the pressures the entertainment world places on people to conform to certain perceptions of what celebrities should be and how they should appear. Her glowing personality and ready smile project the image of a woman content with herself and comfortable in her success, who is able to adapt and fit in to any situation in which she finds herself. But there are greater depths to Penny, which few had perceived until she herself revealed some
of the crushing emotional crises in her life that almost led her to commit suicide. “When you are a well known public figure, people become accustomed to seeing you confident, relaxed and smiling, and somehow they take it for granted that you are sailing through life in some kind of magic bubble, immune from worry, shielded from the bumps of daily life and detached from the emotions that ‘normal’ people experience,” she explains. “It’s a gross distortion of reality. If anything, ‘celebrity’ compounds the pressures on you, because the entertainment industry tries determinedly to mould you into the format it would like to believe and present, and the image that
you yourself create makes often inhuman and unrealistic demands on you. “People seem to think that you don’t have any of the worries and stress that the man-in-the-street goes through and that everything just falls the right side up in your life. Well, I can certainly disprove that misconception very easily!” she laughs. “And of course, because you are a celebrity, when things do go wrong, you can bet your bottom dollar that certain parts of the media, as well as misinformed people, will distort and exaggerate facts to such an extent that they become huge untruths. Words and opinions like that hurt and
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