I'll give you a very brief background...at my old job(s) I took life (and everything) far too seriously. I always went too far and was also perceived as a know-it-all douchebag. I've mellowed out in recent years but it's now come back to bite me.

I've become too self-deprecating. Sometime I'll share stories of myself, up the embarassment factor (you know, exaggeration and story-telling 101), and basically make fun of myself. An example of this is something innocuous like "Ha should've heard me stutter infront of Tom!" (I'd make this a long story and emphasize how awkard I was). The upside is I'm loved by everyone but unfortunately I've noticed a downside and it didn't become prevelant to me until the other day.

One of my colleagues (who's pretty much as low as you can get on the corporate social status scale) retold one of my embarrassing stories to a group of managers, which of course they laughed. Then I started thinking back to other moments, for example, another colleague of mine was messaging people on our corporate email saying "Ha, you should've been here while we were all roasting /u/corin20. Did you hear the story of how he was stuttering infront of Tom? What next he shits himself infront of the CEO". That very line was coming from a guy who didn't come to work for a week and was so offended because they made fun of his weight.

So I'm sitting there and thinking...what the fuck did I do to myself???. I'm supposed to be the clown now? My only mindset right now is thinking that I have to be the "old me", for example, be vicious and insult people to the point where they won't speak to me. I mean, if I could go back I would've chosen a happy median and prevented the clownish perception of me from forming. But now that it's formed, the only way I could escape it in my mind is to just be vicious and mean.

I know it will work and it'll remove the perception of me, but it might turn me into that asshole I use to be.

What would you do?

Thanks guys!