Do you have a reputation? What is it, and where did it come from? Is it accurate? What do you think about it?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us YOU.

I wish I knew what reputation I had in all the circles I find myself in.  Am I an outsider?  An insider?  A wanna-be?  A snob?  I really don’t know, because I’m too busy doing my own thing to really worry about it.  Maybe in a brief moment, I might wonder about it, but then poof! it’s replaced by something else, probably something more hopeful and more fun to replace whatever worry I had about what people thought of me – most likely something I would have no control over anyway, for I know that I can’t please everyone all the time.

I know people who are always worried about what others think of them – in fact I grew with a few of them.  They always worried, and still worry, about “reputation” to the point that what you see when you do see them is so far from who they really are.  It’s all a mask really.  Just like you’re wearing one and I’m wearing one right now, online.

One of my Beverly Hills clients, a former diplomat and widower, one day told me never to change how I looked, even when he himself had come in to see me to soften all the scars from the various nips and tucks he’d had.  It was strange coming from someone like him who went out with a different gorgeous little thing every week or so.  But he’d overheard my previous client that day, a cosmetic surgeon who worked upstairs, tell me that he’d give me a discount on whatever it was I wanted to be done – boob job, nose job, lipo, as long as he or his partner specialized in it.

“How can you say that when you’ve got the reputation of being a ladies’ man, and you go only for the gorgeous women?” I asked after he gave me his well-meaning advice to stay as I was, and not change a thing about how I looked.

“I’ve got a reputation to uphold,” he replied.  “But that’s because I’ve been living in this town for decades and there’s nothing I can do to change that anymore.  But what of the women I take around with me to parties?  They all have had the same cosmetic work done, but they’re replaced by yet another woman and another woman because all they have is what you see on the outside.  And that doesn’t last at all.”

For a time, I found myself worrying about whether he was telling me to only focus on my inside traits because I wasn’t pretty enough by Beverly Hills/Hollywood standards.   But after that brief moment of feeling sorry for myself, of thinking that no amount of money could change the way I looked anyway and make me look any whiter or taller or prettier, I remember shrugging it off and thinking to myself, “oh well, what does it really matter anyway if I didn’t live in Beverly Hills or Hollywood to begin with?”

I mean, at that time I lived in the South Bay where, after a day’s work, I would run out to the beach before the sun would set and played volleyball with friends and laugh over mango margaritas and chips and salsa, not worrying about whether I was pretty enough or good enough. Only that I was happy to be wherever I was, and wherever else I would find myself in.  And I think that’s the reputation that I’d like people to know about me above all.   That I’m happy – even though I write about some sad stuff on this blog sometimes.

Or maybe just “hopeful”…

Daily Prompt