Reputation
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Among the things I have been thinking about lately, my reputation was just one of them. It is not as if I have an infamous reputation but I have a reputation… everyone does. We just don’t think about it too much because reputations are beliefs held by others about you and not any other way. However, it never hurts to wonder how one is being perceived.
Before I start, I would like to clarify that I am not the kind of person who thinks too much about what others think about me. You can either love me or hate me with nothing in between. That is the kind of mindset which help me through life without being an overkill. It is just easier to view the world in black and white even though I know it isn’t. But I am getting off-topic so I digress.
During one of my moments of insecurity or boredom, I tend to wonder how people perceive me as a person. Frankly, this topic is harder to tackle than I first anticipated because there are so many factors that come into play when it comes to perception.
Besides the many factors that come into play, the hardest part is to think about how others perceive oneself without twisting the story in any way since we tend to be biased in an overly negative or positive way.
Nevertheless, I will try my level best to answer my question about how people perceive me and what my reputation could be in this world.
First things first, I always like to start with the definition of the topic I am trying to tackle since this ensures that everyone is on the same page when it comes to the definition of the topic in discussion.
The more common definition for reputation is according to the dictionary ‘the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something.’ Another definition would be that reputation is ‘a widespread belief that someone or something has a particular characteristic.’
To be fair, I believe both definitions are very similar. Since it is just a certain belief that a certain person is a certain way. According to the definition of reputation, I am just trying to look for a characteristic or opinion held about me.
However, this just raises the question of from whom? Since opinions vary vastly from person to person since perception varies vastly between the people as well. Many other factors come into play when it comes to perception and opinion development as well such as personal history.
For instance, I tend to see everything in a very negative light. I don’t seem to have noticed this failure mindset but the people in my immediate surrounding certainly did. It is just because I seem to have lost the faith in humanity and myself to a certain extent.
In my defence, it is easier to expect the worst and be happy when the worst does not happen than expect the best to be just disappointed. Nevertheless, I seem to have taken this mindset to an extreme and I am working on changing it. Until then, I digress…
Anyhow, the point I was trying to make is that the reputation one might hold is different when you ask different people. Given the fact that random strangers would barely notice you, they will be excluded from the rest of this article from consideration.
Nevertheless, this still leaves a lot of other non-strangers. They can range anywhere from see-everyday-but-don’t-know colleagues and classmates to barely-see-but-really-close family and friends. It probably goes without saying that every one of their opinions would be different.
Colleagues and classmates have little to no information about you besides how you behave in public. And that is going to be a lot to consider as well because how you are in public is most of the time out of your control. Or better put you are probably not thinking about it all the time.
This means that you can be incredibly rude to the people around you and your colleagues/classmates will probably never know the reason why. From that point on you will probably be known as a grump-a-lot or have an approach with caution.
Your colleagues or classmates will never know why you are in a bad mood, unlike your friends and family who probably know the reason why.
To be fair, now thinking about it, a reputation is perceived by the passing by and not the people who know you the best and who will paint the most flattering image of you. So even one´s most unappealing trait and most random strangers should be taken under consideration.
After a lot of pondering, I have made a list of all the people who can perceive you. Technically, I have this at the ready for when I am writing character profiles for the characters in the book, I am writing but I believe this list comes quite in handy for this situation.
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Out of people, I believe strangers are the hardest to estimate since one will never know. With friends, family and even classmates one will find out how they perceive you. Strangers on the other hand will forever more be unknown.
If those strangers become friends, then they are no longer strangers and one can no longer get impartial cold hard truth. So, I am a bit stuck on this. However then I remembered the game, me and my roommate love to play when we people-watch.
Whenever we eat out we would always take a seat closest to the window and people watch while we wait for our food. People watching is like meeting people without actually meeting them. We would just sit there and deduce what their relationship status, career, age, etc… would be.
Most of the time we would be wrong since it is nearly impossible to correctly guess one´s age without 100% certainty. All we can do is make estimations based on the information we perceive. Sometimes we could be right. The point is we will never know.
Now, I just have to take the approach of perceiving myself as a stranger on the street, which is a hard thing to do since I know who I am. However, I can do the next best thing by imagining a person wearing my clothes and their gait because that is all I get to go on.
Since my outfits are unpaired but comfortable, I will say that I put comfort and practicality above looks. My gait is rather fast-paced so people could perceive me as being in a constant hurry. My strides are calculated so I would say that I am conscientious and attentive.
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Now that strangers are out of the way, it can only go up from here. Fellow students. There are two types of fellow students and I only intend to focus on one type since the others would fall under strangers as well. The types are the people who have worked with me and people who haven´t.
The people who have worked with me always described me as being well-prepared and hard-working. During lectures, I tend to take a lot of notes or work on my uni-load while I listen to the professors (otherwise, I will fidget which will distract me more than taking notes). In the lab, I am a fast-paced and well-informed classmate since they will often ask me things related to the work because I am always ahead.
From a familiar standpoint, the people who have worked with me probably would consider me as helpful. However, classmates who have worked with me would also describe me as impatient and curse/complain a lot.
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To be perfectly fair, I don’t run into authoritative figures that often since I don’t work, and I don’t consider professors as authority personnel. I barely run into governmental authority figures and my parents are not that authoritative.
In other words, I don’t consider anyone besides the police and other governmental authorities as authority figures. When it comes to police, I tend to not mess around, which means I will probably go unnoticed so… there’s that.
When I said I already finished the hardest part of this article when I finished writing the bit on strangers, well… turns out I was wrong because frankly I am not sure what friends are exactly and I have planned to figure it out in a different article.
Since I don’t want to get into it in this article, I will just loosely define anyone I am willing to talk to regularly my friend with no consideration for their true intention behind being my friend in the first place.
Since I do like to take interest in their lives, I would believe they consider me to be considerate and caring. At the same time, they will probably also define me as complicated since they know I have some things that I am not willing to address.
My friends will probably never face me and tell me exactly how they perceive me without sugar-coating anything so the best I can do is speculate. Since my friends are very different people I will leave it at the three adjectives I have stated above.
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Since I don’t have regular run-ins with children, I can´t even go off facial expressions for this part. Besides I am not sure what exactly is considered to be a child. What age specifically since perception varies in this vast age group.
Let´s take babies, for instance, they are new to the world and don’t have a properly working memory so they will probably forget me anyways. In the first few months, babies probably prefer their parents anyways since they are familiar people.
3- to 5-year-olds are easily bribed so I believe their perception of one is solely based upon how much candy you are willing to give them. If one tends to be generous, they tend to like one more.
Then comes the 6–9-year-olds who have a working memory and are not easily bribed. Since I, for the most time, can´t stand children in that age group for being annoying, will probably perceive me as distant.
Lastly, the teenagers. They are most of the time living in their world. If someone my age would try to relate to them, they will probably find it hilarious and or be deeply embarrassed. So, their perception of me would be deeply biased too.
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This is where I am unsure who exactly is meant. Given I don’t have a boyfriend and that I have no close relations with any guy, who is meant? Where do the people know me from and how well do they know me?
If I should pick any situation, I pick the guys I have met outside of uni at the sports club (not the gym). Since it is, at this point the only group of people I haven’t covered. They are not friends per se but they are certainly not strangers.
As I have found out that I am a bit of an extrovert whenever I feel comfortable and frankly, I am comfortable when doing sports because (and I never thought I will ever write this but) I am rather good in my sporting discipline by comparison.
Frankly, being good at something and being comfortable is a bad combination since I could get hyperactive, talk loudly, act on impulse and get really competitive, which can be considered as annoying by many.
Sadly, this also gives off the wrong impression of myself, since the guys who know me outside of sports will see me as closed off and unapproachable. To a certain extent, I believe that guys also find me intimidating, which can be a good sign or bad.
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Last but not least, are the people who know me all too well. They have seen me in my best times and my worst. My family who have an overly fond image of me, which feels undeserved. An adoration which feels misplaced.
My parents have accused me on multiple occasions of being a workaholic who does not go out to socialize much. My grandparents don’t see me every day so they can´t say the same. They can only say that they are proud.
My brother… I don’t know what he thinks of me. My uncle from my father´s side is rather closed off, so I don’t know what he thinks either. My aunts and uncles from my mother´s side are rather fond of me, while my cousins probably think I am a killjoy. All in all, love and hate.
Photo by Lino Khim Medrina (Pexels)
With this article, I was not only trying to figure out what people believe about me but I also was trying to encourage anyone wondering about their reputation and how other people perceive them to actually take some time to think about it.
This little exercise will not only help you step into someone else´s shoes for the time being but it can also help you discover your strengths and flaws, which you can work on and become the better person you were hoping to become.
Before writing this article, I didn’t give too much of a crap about how people perceived me but while I was writing this article, I realized that I should give a crap about how people I care about perceive me before they leave.