She’s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck.

An actress known for light, bubbly romantic comedies and teen dramas throws a bong out of a thirty-sixth-floor window, to the dismay of assembled police officers. Her neighbors tell the press that she’s been talking to herself, and that they suspect a psychotic break. A timeline of her “meltdown” appears on Jezebel. Late-night comedians have grist for months.

A reality-TV star appears on the cover of Vogue, causing massive backlash and speculation as to whether the magazine has “killed” its prestigious brand. The woman is rumored to have leaked her own sex tape. She once accepted thousands of dollars to accompany a wealthy man on a date. In the Vogue issue in question, she’s posing with her fiancé and newborn child. Readers threaten to boycott the publication.

An actress’s “fuck list,” naming every man she’s slept with, is circulated in advance of her upcoming reality series. A musician’s “fuck list,” naming every man she’s thought to have dated, is printed up in Helvetica font and sold as a T-shirt online.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her apartment.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship is found dead in her hotel bathtub.

A pop star known for her drug use and troubled relationship remains under her father’s conservatorship due to mental incompetency. Ticket sales for her Las Vegas shows are through the roof.

It’s easy to look at these women and see what they did wrong, tally up their sins and errors: insensitive, provocative, promiscuous, off-the-wagon, crazy. It’s easy to tell yourself, this is not my story. But I’d wager good, hard money that, if you got the chance to speak to any of these women, they’d tell you that these are not their stories, either.

The privilege of controlling your own narrative is easy to take for granted. It’s easy to confuse for a right; to assume that, of all the people in this loud and crowded world, you’re the person best suited to tell the world who you are, or what you are, or what your actions and emotions mean in context.

But it escalates from there. All too often, losing your story also means that if you make decisions people don’t like—after a certain point, in this process, every decision you make will be one people don’t like—they feel entitled to hurt you. It means being subject to a hostile, unasked-for, all-consuming intimacy: having other people claim ownership over your body, your sexual history, your medical history, your emotional life, your future. Having them feel entitled to scream slurs at you, or threaten your life, or call your employer until you’re unemployed, if you don’t follow instructions. Nothing is off-limits: After Whitney Houston died, ABC News published the information that the coroner had found scars on her chest consistent with breast implants. It had nothing to do with her death—she had drowned, and breast implants have never, to my knowledge, risen up of their own accord and drowned their owner—but the world was, apparently, entitled to that information.

This isn’t “the cost of fame,” some necessary price one pays for being a public figure—or, if it is, it’s only in the sense that everyone is a public figure, because it happens to “civilians,” too—people who post unflattering pictures of themselves, or irritate one too many people with their personal blogs, or say stupid things on Twitter. And it isn’t simply a matter of getting punished for wrongdoing—or, if it is, we should all be worried, because this specific wrong-doing tends to sneak up on people from behind, when they haven’t intentionally or knowingly broken any rules. No one becomes a musician hoping to be placed on someone’s celebrity death watch list. No one takes her first drink hoping to become an alcoholic. And no one—I am almost entirely certain—has ever had sex assuming that the experience will later be summarized on a popular novelty T-shirt.