Personal Reputation
When I was nine, I moved to a new place and I had to go to a new school. It was hard to make new friends, since I didn't have to the past years, but I found a girl where I had a good time with. I will call her Tess in this blogpost. We became best friends and she was the only one that I was hanging out with on school. Three years later it was time to go to high school. I didn't was to lose our friendship and didn't was to make new friends. I decided that I wanted to go to the same high school as Tess, despite I preferred another school. Tess was a fun person if you knew her, but she was not very social towards others. However, I wanted to meet new people, but every time I wanted to sit with someone else I felt like I was abandoning Tess. Until my third year in high school I had a reputation that I was not very social and I was sometimes funny in class (I was a little bit cheeky towards my teachers back then).
In my third year, I noticed that I wanted to do more girly things. I started to try to meet new people and I found a girl, I will call her Lisa in this blogpost, that was as girly as me. She started to get to know me and she found out that I was social. We started to hang out more and I finally got the opportunity to do more girly things. However, Tess didn’t like Lisa, because she was ‘stealing’ me from her and she started to feel ‘abandoned’. I chose to be myself and to hang out with Lisa, but Tess didn’t like that and we stopped talking to each other. I was enjoying the time with Lisa, we became best friends. Just like the girls in the movies, Lisa and I wanted to become popular and we planned to make this happen. We wanted to be more social and decided who we should start to be friends with. It surprisingly worked out extremely well. However, after a while I started to get the feeling that I could ‘cancer the world’. I thought that I could do anything, because everyone would like me anyways. I started to be mean to people and later, consequently, people started to be mean to me as well. I hated this experience and reputation that I had built. People saw me as an arrogant girl, while I wasn’t deep inside.
I knew I wasn’t the girl from the reputation that I had, so I started to change. I started to be nice again, but I couldn’t change my reputation in one day. At first, people didn’t believe my honest kindness and I had a hard time proving that they were wrong. However, I kept on with being nice, because I knew that my reputation and their consequences weren’t making me happy. It took me a full year to get a better reputation, but the ‘enemies’ that I had made were still there. I accepted it and was happy that people started to be nice to me again. I hadn’t regained my old reputation, but I didn’t mind. I learned a lot form this experience about myself and I got a better reputation then before, as a kind a social girl.
After reflecting on this experience, I recognize how my reputation influenced my behavior. It influenced my behavior when I wasn’t happy with my reputation, but also when I had a very strong and good reputation. When I was not happy with being the not social and shy girl, I started to be more social. I think that was a good change for me. After my reputation got to the point where people thought I was social, funny and cool, I started to behave in a very mean way. My reputation got to my head at that point, but luckily the consequences of getting the reputation as an arrogant girl made me change my behavior in a way that I started to be kind again.
