Frank
My LinkedIn profile bio used to make me feel vaguely embarrassed. Not because the facts were wrong, but because no arrangement of job titles and skill keywords ever described an actual human being.
That’s a small problem with a bigger symptom underneath it.
The Box Problem
The internet, and honestly most of professional life, wants you to be one thing. It wants a handle it can grab. Systems Engineer. Tech blogger. Music creator. Gym guy. Southern conservative. Whatever.
The moment you combine more than two of those things in the same sentence, people get uncomfortable. Not hostile, usually, just confused. Like you handed them a puzzle piece that doesn’t match the box they’re working from.
I’m a 55-year-old guy who grew up in rural Middle Georgia, spent nearly three decades in enterprise IT, lifts weights, got his first tattoo at 52, watches The Masters like other people watch the Super Bowl, listens to the Allman Brothers and Prince with equal sincerity, and spends his evenings building React apps he won’t shut up about. I have a German Shepherd named Oakley and a grandson named Kade who was born last October and who I’m already planning to corrupt with proper music taste.
None of that fits in a dropdown menu.
What Gen-X Got Wrong About This
My generation grew up being told that not fitting in was a badge of honor. The latchkey kid mythology, the slacker reputation, the grunge-era anti-establishment posture. We turned outsider identity into its own kind of brand.
The problem is we just replaced one box with another. “I don’t fit in” is still a category. You can market it. People do.
What I actually mean is something less performative. I genuinely don’t experience my interests as contradictions that need resolving. Powerlifting and programming aren’t a quirky combination to me. They’re just Tuesday. The guitar-heavy Southern rock that shaped how I hear music and the AI-generated tracks I’m building in my homelab exist in the same brain without any tension, because they’re both about the same thing, which is figuring out how sound works and why certain combinations of notes and rhythm do something to you.
My brain likes patterns. It likes pulling things apart to see the mechanism. That applies to an Exchange hybrid configuration at 2 AM, a ZZ Top guitar tone, and the way a well-designed app handles state. The subject matter changes. The cognitive itch is identical.
The Part Nobody Tells You
Here’s the thing that took me embarrassingly long to land on. The discomfort of not fitting a clean profile isn’t yours to solve. It belongs to whoever’s trying to categorize you.
I used to do the work of explaining myself in advance. Preemptively accounting for how someone might find it weird that the IT veteran from a town with more cows than traffic lights also has tattoos and an opinion about Muscle Shoals session musicians. I’d soften the edges. Lead with the professional credentials. Tuck the rest in.
That’s a waste of energy. And it produces a flattened version of a person that isn’t particularly interesting to anyone, including you.
The more I’ve leaned into just being the full thing, the more useful it’s actually been. The IT guys get the music angle. The music guys get the technical precision angle. People who find Knuckledust Chronicles through a PowerShell post stick around because they get interested in what else is going on here. That’s not strategy. That’s just what happens when you stop editing yourself down.
What Actually Changed
I didn’t have some epiphany. There was no single moment. What happened is that enough years went by that the exhaustion of managing perception started outweighing whatever benefit I imagined I was getting from it.
Fifty-five does something to your relationship with other people’s opinions. Not in a “don’t care about anything” way, more in a “my time is finite and curating my identity for strangers is a terrible use of it” way.
I have a homelab full of machines with names. I have a grandson whose first real music lesson is going to happen whether his grandfather plans it or not. I have a barbell waiting at the gym for me. I have tattoos I’m proud of and sessions still scheduled. I have songs in Suno that came from somewhere real.
All of that belongs to the same person. I stopped apologizing for the combination.
The algorithm can sort it out on its own.
