What are you to do when everyone disagrees? With your choices, with your art, with your life?

For years, I thought this kind of peer feedback was a built-in safety mechanism. My friends would _never _let me do something so stupid as to release a book, or record an album, and embarrass myself. Or wear a yellow wristband with a pink Z, or drink pink cocktails as man, or…

But what to do when you feel so comfortable in your choices that you can’t imagine an alternative and yet everyone laughs, questions, or pokes?

You calmly explain to them, one at a time, that we all think differently. Cognitive and neurodiversity.

That there are some who think in shapes and concepts, and some who think in words and sentences. It’s often hard for me, as a person who thinks in words, to really be accepted by someone who thinks in shapes and concepts. It’s like we’re talking in two different languages if we ever get below the small talk, even though both of us speak perfectly good English.

Put me in a room of graphic designers, and you can pretty much find me curled up in a corner feeling like a total idiot, while in a room of songwriters my ideas might be seen as creative and compelling.