Really being myself, I find it quite challenging.

What is the hardest part: Admitting to oneself that you don't like doing something that the social environment perceives as normal.

Here are 3 examples that I have realized for myself:

1 – I like to work alone 👨🏼‍💻

Admitting that is super hard for me. Because I'm afraid it comes across as “I'm not a team player.” And that disqualifies me for almost all jobs 😄

But it just is: I prefer to work alone. Completely undisturbed. I love to get feedback from other people, but most of the time I want to work on something alone (e.g., on designs).

Maybe I'm just a control freak 💩

2 – I don't like going to concerts 🎶

I love music. I have played hundreds of gigs myself, written concert reviews as a music journalist, studied musicology.

In my identity, it was firmly established that I liked going to concerts of (rock) bands.

And at some point, I realized that I actually never really liked them. I dislike standing around for hours listening to songs in bad sound with many people*. When I could instead listen alone to the much better-sounding recording.

For me, live gigs are like a comic artist trying to redraw their already finished graphic novel and I'm watching it live with hundreds of people in a stuffy room. Strange, right?

3 – I don't understand museums 🏛

This point is probably the most controversial 😄. I simply don't get the concept of museums. Museums are very exhausting for me, and I rarely take away much. 

You pay to walk for a long time through huge buildings and look at a bunch of objects or artworks at a relatively high frequency.

I understand that museums can be great for deepening a topic that you already know very well.

But 87.5% of the people in museums have no clue about the art or the objects that stand before them. They see them for the first time. Personally, it tires me to only get snippets about a new topic without actually deepening my understanding.

My museum visits often end up with me sitting on a bench with the accompanying book for the exhibition, reading that, and then maybe looking at a handful of things.

Controversial opinion: I gain more from reading a book on the subject and then looking at photos of the objects or artworks on the internet.