DO YOU CARE WHAT THEY THINK?

Luky
SOME OF THE WORST MISERY AND ANGUISH OF MIND IN THE WORLD IS CAUSED BY FEAR OF WHAT OTHERS THINK ABOUT ONE. 
What a waste of time.

Come to think of it, what person in your circle of acquaintances is absolutely perfect in your eyes?
  I have stopped going to tea parties and giving them, because somewhere along the line I always hear myself saying things like: "Please don't tell Alice what I said, but you know she hasn't a clue about child raising."
  At home I'm safe, my children don't gossip and to my husband at least I never needed to say: "Please don't tell Alice . . . " and that was most relaxing.

Went with it
  I used to worry a lot about making a good impression on people at one time, and when I didn't succeed it would make me most unhappy.
  I wasted some of my best years moping.
  Then one day it occurred to me that, no matter what I did or said, some people would remark:
  "Isn't she a shot in the arm?" and others: "Boy, what a pain in the neck!"
  Once I'd accepted that I began to enjoy life.

  When I first went to school in South Africa, my chatty ways made little impression on my teachers.
  After the first term a report card arrived on which my conduct was tersely described in the words: "Talkative and quarrelsome." I still don't know whether to laugh or to cry when I recall how eagerly I ran for my English-Dutch dictionary to find out what these big words meant, so that I could tell my parents.

In the middle
  As the years went by I grew tired of licking my wounds. Being the centre of a talkative and quarrelsome family I am too busy to worry about my popularity or lack of it.
  Still, there are times when I feel that people might mind their p's and q's somewhat when talking to me, if not for my sake then surely for their own, especially when I expected a baby.
  "You've picked up a lot of weight," someone said one day.
  I laughed: "I'm going to have a baby," I said.
She literally shrieked out for all to hear: 
"What? Again?"
  Some years before that would have caused me to assume a wig, sunglasses and a headscarf in order to appear incognito until after the happy event.

Cool comeback
  As it was I just said: "You make it sound as if it were the fifteenth, instead of only the fifth. What will you say when I'm expecting my tenth, I wonder?" and the lady beside her whom I didn't know thought that so funny that she nearly choked in her tea. [So alright, I do go to a tea party now and then.]

  Then there is an odd sort of expression that many people used when addressing me years ago:
  "Are you still walking!" they used to ask with an exasperation as if they kept me in shoe leather.
  That was until  I thought of a good answer:
"Yes, I am," I would say, tongue in cheek, "but only until the baby comes. After that I'm going to do handstands and cartwheels all over the place."