Mental Health Monday: The Thing About Your Reputation Is It Is Not Entirely Yours

Eight years ago today, Taylor Swift released reputation, an album about finding love amidst the noise of public scrutiny and negative press. While her sixth studio album is known for its themes of revenge and reclaiming her narrative, it also serves as a love story about building a relationship in private while dealing with public criticism. The album moves from an angry, defensive first half to a more vulnerable and romantic second half, where love becomes a source of solace and strength. It closes with New Year’s Day, a song about the quieter, intimate moments of a relationship, which stands in contrast to the album’s opening tracks.

reputation is my favourite Taylor album, followed by folklore and THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (#GreyAlbumSupremacy) and on rep’s first anniversary I put up a blog post detailing why I love it so fucking much that I got a tattoo of the album title.

You can read the post here so I do not have to repeat myself, because for today’s Mental Health Monday post I want to focus on the emotional DNA of reputation and its link to our mental health.

I used to think reputation was something you built, brick by careful brick, like a wall you could hide behind when the weight of everything became too heavy. And while that is largely true, because you do have a say in how you show up and how you are seen, I have learned that your reputation is not entirely yours. It is also a reflection of what people think they see, refracted through their own projections, biases, and gossip. We choose the mask, but the gaze that meets it is never ours to command.

That external gaze is why we often overexplain, desperate to correct how we are perceived, because there is a particular ache that comes with being misunderstood. Not despised or dismissed, but simply misread. The same day I got my reputation tattoo (my 13^th, obviously 😎) I also got a ‘missunderstood’ (deliberate typo) tattoo on my foot because, one thing about me, I am hella misunderstood. So I decided that if I am going to be misunderstood, I might as well own it. If I cannot control the narrative, I can at least curate the font.

When Taylor announced that she finally reclaimed ownership of her master recordings, six years after Scooter Braun first acquired her catalog from Scott Borchetta, she had this to say about reputation (Taylor’s Version):

I know, I know. What about Rep TV? Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it. The Reputation album was so specific to that time in my life, and I kept hitting a stopping point when I tried to remake it. All that defiance, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood, that desperate hope, that shame-born snarl and mischief. To be perfectly honest, it’s the one album in the first 6 that I thought couldn’t be improved upon by redoing it. Not the music, or photos, or videos. So I kept putting it off. There will be a time (if you’re into the idea) for the unreleased Vault tracks from that album to hatch.

For people like me who live a lot inside their heads, that longing to be understood while feeling purposely misunderstood is almost inevitable. We communicate in nuance, but the world prefers headlines. So you become an idea in someone else’s mind: “too much,” “too cold,” “too sensitive,” “too intense.” You start hearing yourself through their filters, and before long, your self-concept begins to warp.

It is a subtle kind of loneliness, the kind that makes you overexplain everything. I have caught myself apologising for being misunderstood. Which, when you think about it, is a ridiculous thing to be sorry for. But that is the quiet tax of womanhood: we inherit the responsibility of narrative management. We curate, we soften, we make ourselves legible. I have written paragraphs trying to clarify what I meant when a simple sentence would have sufficed. I have replayed conversations at 3 a.m., wondering if I came off “wrong.” Because that is the thing about anxiety: it does not need an audience to perform, it just needs the memory of one.

But here is what I have learned in the seven years since I got my ‘missunderstood’ tattoo, being misunderstood is not always a tragedy. Sometimes it is proof that you are growing beyond the language people used to describe you. That discomfort of not being seen correctly? It is the friction of transformation.

These days, when I feel the urge to defend myself, I try to pause and ask: Is this about being understood, or about being accepted? Because sometimes, what we call “clarifying” is actually us begging to be loved. Yet the healthier thing might just be to let the misunderstanding stand, and still love yourself through it.

So I have started experimenting with something radical: letting people be wrong about me. Letting them misread my silence as arrogance, my boundaries as hostility, my solitude as sadness. Watching your own reputation shapeshift without your permission is terrifying at first, but then it becomes liberating, because the energy you once spent managing the external gaze can now be entirely devoted to yourself.

The thing about your reputation is it is not entirely yours. Like reputation, the album, it is a reflection of moments, perceptions and projections outside your control. Learning to let go of it is its own kind of therapy, though some days it is far easier said than done. But the misunderstandings, assumptions and judgements that once haunted me are now just echoes I do my best to acknowledge and release. When you stop trying to control what is never yours, you can finally live for the parts that are: your choices, your joy, your resilience, your love, your mistakes, your growth, your heart, your dreams. Like Taylor and her master recordings, all those things are mine, entirely mine, even if my reputation is not.