TL;DR - Personal story about me not admitting I like tech as the popular guy in the 90's and wasting close to 20 professional years to jobs I did not like.
I moved around a lot when I was a kid. A lot. I'm not exaggerating if I tell you I visited two schools per year. It made me socially strong, capable of making friends wherever I went, shaping my image school after school, until I had some kind of go-to character that I could introduce to my new environment and that would work anywhere, in any situation.
Now that's the good part. I'm the guy that gets noticed when he walks in a room. I can adapt to different situations and blend in like a cameleon or stand out and change the whole situation to my liking.
The sad part is that the character I formed (popular, fun-loving, athletic) did not allow the geek inside to surface.
I remember us having a computer at home that could be loaded with cassette tapes. You would run the tape to a certain point and it would play a 'game' or a piece of music. I do not remember the brand of the thing, just that it had an red, plastic monitor with a black screen and white letters. They would sometimes turn green, but a good whack against the monitor would fix that.
And I loved it. I could write line after line and record it to the tape and then play what I just told it to play. Over and over again. In a language that I don't recall either, but it must've been BASIC considering I couldn't have been older than 10.
Now you might think that a healthy interest in computers would've been applauded and motivated by people that cared for me. Wrong. This was the '90's. Computers were for nerds with bad skin and a serious lack of sexual intercourse. This did not fit in my default character that I so thoroughly had shaped over all these years. So every time I found myself into tech like the first mobile phones or the first modems to get online, I'd pretend I didn't care much. It didn't fit the profile, right?
So I did what a guy does, I traveled, became a police officer in Amsterdam, then a prisonguard in the worst prison of the Netherlands and spent the next 10 years living a life that I had carefully sculpted out of laziness. Because that's what it was. Laziness.
Don't get me wrong, I haven't lived a sad story. I got married, we were blessed with two kids and then I married the same girl 10 years later again, just because she is the absolute best. But still, no tech, although I was fixing computers for friends and family, reading up on Linux and developing a taste for smartphones in my spare time.
Even in my early 30's, when I decided to actually get a degree next to my fulltime job, I went for Economics. Not a Computer Science degree, but Economics. Why? Because my brain would not allow me to step away from my prejudice against tech and it's geekiness. For years I would watch YouTube tutorials about app development and smartphone architecture, but when I got the chance I decided I needed to study Economics. Miserable piece of person, me.
It took me 37 years to come out. I finally convinced myself it's okay to be a nerd. A baldheaded, fitnesscrazy nerd. I even asked my employer if they were interested in helping me educate myself the right way. And they were. I went from Android with Java to Ionic with Angular and I'm currently learning Flutter with Dart, the latter giving me so much joy and happiness I just wish I had found it sooner.
Now the reason I'm writing this stuff is because I don't want you to be me. I'm mad at myself for not letting myself be me professionally. I regret the 'lost' years in my professional life. It feels like I have 20 years of catching up to do, while I have been in jobs and studies that I only started because me and my environment expected me to be doing those things. Don't lose time, you only get one life. Do what your heart tells you to do.
Do not give up on your true interests, just because you think it doesn't fit your profile.
Change the freaking profile.