5s do have a reputation problem, maybe not the one we think…

Recently, I’ve been taken back regularly by some visions of my past to a specific period of my life that influenced so much my relationship with my reputation as a 5.

5s will be talked about and attract attention

Much younger, I had no idea people were paying real attention to me. They wouldn’t tell me and I would suspect it but not trust myself. I was maybe 14 when I was faced with my first “reputation problem”. Before that, I was a good student with good grades, I was easy in class, behaving “well”. Besides my friends and family and the occasional conflicts I was having with them, I had no idea people were talking about me when I wasn’t there.

This changed when I had my first “official” boyfriend in middle school, a blond boy with piercing blue eyes I was madly in love for a long time and had become friends and then more… it was a huge deal to me. Hard to not smile writing all this…

I realized we both weren’t the only ones who cared about this when I was told I made younger girls quite angry at me. Apparently, he was very coveted by a bunch of girls younger than him. Suddenly, I noticed stares and whispers, became quite self-conscious. I had had the feeling of being invisible for so long, but from that day, it was obvious I wasn’t. It’s only when it did I learned that people were seeing me, they just wouldn’t say anything to me. It was quite a shock.

If I had met my younger self, I would now tell her how normal it was, how much it didn’t even have much to do with my actual behaviour, that 5s are talked about behind their back. It’s part of our life, it doesn’t matter which kind of talk, it doesn’t even matter what we actually do technically, we can’t control it : when you’re projected as much as we are, people talk and it will be both positive and negative. We tend to attract a form of attention that makes our behaviour more noticeable, while the projections also create a lot of expectations about how those behaviors should be like.

When reputation takes a serious hit : burning at the stake

A couple of months later, I was broken up with by the beautiful blue-eyed boy and heartbroken. But that’s not all that Proggy (the Program) had in stock for me that year. Looking back at my Solar returns those 2 years, one could see how much they were more sexualized and would instil all kinds of initiations of new experiences. Apparently that year, it was about love.

I was devastated after the beautiful blond boy broke up with me. Imagine that… I have an undefined G with 2 10.3, so a part of my not-self direction is about finding ways to be experimenting and also an undefined head interested in things that don’t matter and an open ego, and was conditioned “like a woman”, for Mindy (my mind), I have many things to prove about love. That year, I started to experiment with what that could mean.

I won’t go into boring details I’m sure you don’t give a shit about. But in the next few months, I went out with 3 other boys. And the first one was after an utterly not-self decision. The kind where you really learn the awfulness of people pleasing. It was a mess. A very public mess. I broke the heart of a dear friend, who was beloved. We both were so sad, and the people got so, so mad.

Those experiments suddenly made me the heartless school slut (note here no one had sex yet here, I was a kissing and going out slut 😂). It was quite awful at the time, I was actually usually a prudish girl, to me it felt like being judged for something I never chose, I just “chose boys” wrong, got my heartbroken and seen as the only mean party. The stares and whispers got so intense I basically didn’t have friends anymore for a while, until I met people outside from the school thanks to an unexpected new ally.

I actually often smile (but also often get really mad at them inside) seeing how many 5s think just because they pissed someone off that this is “burning at the stake”. Nah. This isn’t being burned at stake. Being burned at stake is serious stuff that happens from making not-self decisions. When it actually happens, you can’t get back to the place, you have to leave, bridges are burned, you’re vilified to the point of not being able to regain people’s trust. Pissing off people, that’s not being burned at the stake at all. That’s just a Tuesday (or whichever day) in the life of a 5.

Freedom : “my reputation doesn’t concern me”

When high school started in another school, I quickly learned that it was the same everywhere, it didn’t matter where I was, what I was doing or not doing, people would talk. And if I was overly concerned, I even would often make it way worse while also feeling like shit because I wouldn’t be listening to myself.

I figured, probably avoiding all the inner mess that all I could really do is dismiss wholly my reputation. So when a new friend of mine from high school informed me people had many pressing questions about our status, they could see we were close, and they wanted to know how close. I heard myself say “It doesn’t matter, they probably won’t believe us. Want to have fun? Tell them anything you fancy or that would make you look good. You’ve got my blessing. Let me know if there are fun results, ok?”.

And they were. He had a vivid imagination, he was a nice guy who valued his friendship with me, so he would not make it too demeaning for me but it was quite funny and a little wild. So people had of course a lot of things to say and to react to, and we had so much fun when he would tell me all the stories about them.

My motto at the time and from then on was basically : my reputation doesn’t concern me. I rarely feel so liberated than when I was stricken by this moment of knowing that I didn’t need to care about it.

Enter Human Design and what it is to be a 5 : paranoia-land

Imagine my surprise when I learned that a 5th line reputation is so centered in their life. Of course, I questioned at the time if I should have protected it more than I did. If my not-self was the one that led me to stop feeling like I should do something about it, if I should ask around more what was said about me, what those moments “meant” for that reputation… it sent Mindy on quite a journey.

It was so reinforced through seeing all those 5/1 being clearly very careful about their reputation. It became quite daunting, and was messing with my ability to not censor myself. Do you know how much overthinking an undefined head and G with a 43-23 as her Personality Sun-Earth can do over the approach she’s “meant” to take? 😂

And then, my body dived into a massive and months-long educative boot-camp, learning about everything Ra had to say about lines, and extra bits just about the projections of 2nd and 5th lines.

It turns out that our reputation indeed doesn’t concern us. We really have no control over it besides following our Strategy and Authority (or not). Which technically isn’t in our actual control either. Ra is very clear : only our S&A can protect us against the burning at the stake.

Taking care of our reputation is not-self

People will talk about us. It will be both praise and criticism. When they like us, they will overestimate us regularly and when they don’t they will underestimate us too. Pissing people off and making fans are both 5 line business. But still, being careful about our reputation is still making mental decisions.

I remember someone telling me once : “I like that you tell people what you think, even in public spaces, so many of the 5s around me are hiding what they really think so they don’t damage their reputation”. Yeah guys, we know. We can feel that you hide. People can feel it when we’re being half-truthful, and because we’re 5s and our projection field doesn’t disappear just because we’re more palatable in theory, they/we assume the worse of why we hide, of what we hide, of how much we hide.

I have talked with so many 5s whose paranoia got raised because of what they learned about the importance of reputation for our profiles. It’s heartbreaking how much not-self this feeds. How many of them were even approached by other 5 “allies” and told “be careful about what you’re saying, it will impact your reputation”, even by influential 5 lined teachers, apparently not aware at all of how much saying something like this feed the not-self of someone.

The whole point of Human Design is that we stop fucking interfering with life because we think we need to. Even if I know no one has any choice into doing and thinking whatever we do, Mindy has a hard time not being mad at people using HD info to tell people what to do and not do “because the knowledge tells us to”. Fuck that. The only info we need to not say something is the signals our authority sends. And being in not-self is something to see, not to avoid.

I hate much it censors their voice to tell this to 5th lines in the name of protecting them, feeding all those fears our Maya is already mongering about “goodness” about “power” about the need of having allies and how much that means we should craft a persona rather than be ourselves. I’m still kind of stunned regularly by how much such manipulation is pervasive even in a collective supposedly championing first and foremost “loving ourselves by being ourselves”. We cannot love ourselves if we’re not who we’re meant to be, and what we don’t say “because it could hurt our reputation” cannot by definition, be being ourselves. We don’t have a way to know what our reputation is supposed to be like.

The discomfort of being a 5

And yes, it has negative consequences. A fellow 3/5 kicked me out of her group after I regularly would question what she was saying “because the group seems to bring out too much negativity out of you”, which is of course a ridiculously mental reason, like all reasons we invent for decisions our body makes.

It’s quite common from what I know observing 5s, it sort of screams “I’m uncomfortable with how you challenge my authority publicly and don’t understand this is just the consequence of being a 5, and much worse happens behind my back”, but more importantly, those are just the kind of risks being a 5 and not censoring ourselves to cater a reputation of someone more “nice” or “polite” or “professional” than we actually are. We simply piss off people in all kinds of ways.

And that’s perfectly fine, the more we accept that, the easier it gets. We don’t need to be everywhere, we don’t need to be heard everywhere, we don’t need to be liked by everyone, we cannot. 5s, even incorrect, will always have people who can listen to them and their calls, and the less we censor ourselves for any mental reason, including “taking care of our reputation”, the better the chances are that those people are actually correct for us.

No need to worry for 5s either, even when reactions get more intense

I also thoroughly pissed off someone by publicly saying to a 5/1 the ebook she wrote about how to deal with the emotional authority made no sense to me and would feed the not-self of people reading it. It actually all started with my body deciding to put me on the post against my mind’s will with a 🤨 that she asked for the meaning. Later, someone, a well-meaning 5/2, told a common friend she was “worried” about me being so confrontational publicly.

Apparently not seeing how mentally filtering what we say publicly (or privately) isn’t being a 5, how “expressing concern”, but not even to myself, says more about her relationship to reputation than about me. I wish people would stop “worrying” for us 5s that way. Human Design is so clear that no one knows what someone else should do. Even Projectors.

We do piss off people. We say things that are not comfortable for others to say. That’s our only way to change paradigms, that’s at the heart of heresy. Censoring what’s supposedly putting our reputation at risk is 100% our not-self.

Reactions we provoke don’t matter

Just like trying to censor people who we piss off, like I see so many 5s saying including by saying “I don’t need feedback” or “I didn’t ask for your opinion” when they post publicly and then are challenged.

It’s part of the projection field, when we say things, we are attracting reactions. They don’t matter. The positive ones don’t mean we’re “doing good”, the negative ones don’t mean we’re “doing wrong”. They’re all just projections, that can be both as “wrong” as they can be “right”. We can’t know which. We just can observe and take it all in.

This whole text that came out of me actually started come out to my consciousness after a friend sent me this hilarious screenshot that was a big first for me. I’m very used by now to know people talk about me behind my back. I’ve suspected for a while that it must be worse by now. Before, my not-self would still push me to censor myself a LOT, it doesn’t matter my reputation was not something I cared about in that way. On my end, the way I tend to manipulate myself mentally is that Mindy loves to remind myself of all the times I was “punished” verbally or emotionally after saying “my truth”, of course, dismissing how often I initiated “telling my truth”, which meant it mostly never was my actual truth in the first place. Shutting up is efficient for limiting the punishment received for projection. I’ve noticed that the reactions to my voice got more intense since I a, seemingly following my S&A more, both the positive ones and negative ones. It was nothing the ones the 5/1 admin of one of our groups was receiving (omg the violence of certain messages he was sent that I’ve read 😳), but it can be quite a lot for my nervous system. So I suspected the gossip was too. Besides the one I shared earlier, I hadn’t been informed of much, until last week when I received this gem you can read below.

Some fact checking because otherwise it is not nearly as juicy. The things that person seem to know because I don’t hide them :

• I’ve smoked weed everyday for a bit more than 10 years. Last time was almost 2 years ago.

• I am trained as a clinical psychologist. I stopped advertising myself when I realized how much therapy is incredibly mental (for another day maybe).

• I was intolerant to dairy for 23 years, and to gluten for 5 years. Both could keep me in the worst cases keep me on the toilet for 6hrs straight. Both intolerance disappeared after 1-1.5 years of eating per my Determination. I can consume both without any disagreement. To me, PHS is almost miraculous.

Everything else is my new favourite alternative fictitious life, delicious fruit of my projection fields and the imagination of this person. It provided a few hours of laugh and entertainment when shared with my loved ones, people who have known me up to 2 decades and were all shocked anyone could think all this is true. Of course, Mindy ran wild for a moment when I read it. My heart sank and then pounded in my chest. So many things happened in me at the same time. I wondered again “did I put myself in danger by not restraining myself?”, part of me wanted so badly to contact them and “setting them straight”, there was some outrage, some anxiety, a lot of confusion… it is so very weird to read about oneself but really not oneself at the same time. I was so reassured to watch my self not do anything. And a few moments later, being so full of laughter. And since then, it also provided all those moments of knowing that flew out of me tonight. See? We absolutely don’t need to do or not do anything to feed, their minds will do the rest. And it just feeds all the drama that is being a 5. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Enjoy your own circus! Bisous 😘