New school, new job, new city: your old reputation somehow gets there on an earlier bus.

A fresh start moves your address, not your habits. What follows you is less gossip than the pattern that produced the reputation in the first place, and it rebuilds the same impression in a new room within a few weeks. That is discouraging if you were hoping for amnesty, and useful if you would rather change the actual thing.

Before the next fresh start, pick the one behaviour you would not want repeated and work on it where you are. Change it in front of people who remember the old version, which is harder and counts more. Then what arrives ahead of you is something you would be glad to meet.