Tannaz Hosseinpour

The other day I came across a poem by one of my favorite poets Rumi in which he said, “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.” The poem goes against everything we’ve learned growing up, which basically was advice on how to not ruin our reputation and to always care about what people think of us because somehow our lives are dependent on the opinion of others. Which made me think… what a reputation is even, like what does it even mean? Is there one fixed reputation that I can have in  If I’m constantly worried about acting a certain way, talking a certain way, thinking a certain way my life, or do I have different reputations because if you ask person X about me, they’re going to have a different perspective of me than Person Y, and so on. That’s because people can only see others from the level of understanding and consciousness that t