A rumor can wreck your reputation in a week. It can’t touch what you actually did.

Reputation is a story other people are holding, and stories can be rewritten by anyone with an audience and a motive. What you actually did is a separate thing, fixed, still true on the days when nobody believes it. Mixing the two up is what makes a bad week feel like a verdict on your whole life.

Keep doing the work while the story is wrong, because consistency is the only argument that lands over time. Give your version once, calmly, to the people who matter, then leave it there. Most rumours run out of fuel faster than the panic predicts.