Well, that your Buddhist friend is proud that you happen to associate with him, that means that you might be doing something right. There is a tendency sometimes in Buddhists to seek the security of obscurity. Having had an attachment to it myself, I can understand it. But I had to get over that feeling of wanting the obscurity, especially when I started teaching. I found that it was helpful to build up the power of Compassion so I could open myself to blame. So that's usually what is behind this wish for obscurity. If I have obscurity then I'm not going to get blamed. We have an adaptation of a Bob Dylan song, "They blame you while you're playing your guitar, they blame you just for who and what you are. Everyone must get blamed." Even the Buddha got blamed and he was perfect.
It's not so much the blame that's the problem, it's our reaction to it. Sometimes the more caring and compassionate and kind you try to be, the more people blame you. Perhaps because they don't know where you are coming from. It's something they don't understand. And when people meet with something they don't understand, often they try to make themselves a bit more secure by trying to categorize you in some way. It can make them feel more comfortable.
It's nice to try to make them feel as comfortable as they can, but realize they are responsible for their own actions and thoughts. And that does not mean that we stop doing beneficial actions, because that would prevent us from making good Kamma for ourselves. This actually goes into the guided meditation of this morning concerning the eight worldly dhammas; praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and obscurity.
We are learning how to not be so attached to these things by looking at our intentions and taking joy with our intentions. This is showing Compassion to ourselves. Because we may do something with a beneficial intention yet people still may blame us. If we get attached to avoiding the uncomfortable feeling of blame by being obscure, then it may prevent us from making good Kamma. But we have to know who to help and who not to help and guide our Generosity with wisdom, our good actions with wisdom. That is why we stay at Wat Kow Tahm, and let people come to us. Or, we also go to places where we know that people want our help, because you can't really help people who don't want to be helped.
As far as our resenting the projections that other people may have formed about us, this only makes us suffer. A good way to let go of this is the D/D meditation about unjustified prejudice, thinking of the other people in the world who get judged just because the color of their skin or their sex or whatever. I had a lot of projections put onto me because of being a female lay teacher in a monastic tradition. If I had taken it to heart then it might have prevented me from doing the best I can and listening more to what the Buddha says about people's potential. So it's just a matter of doing the D/D and recognizing that a lot of people get a lot of negative projections put on them, and that if we allow them to affect us then we are playing into their game and allowing them to gain power over us. We try not to do that. As far as fame and obscurity, learning how to have more compassion helps us to open to blame.