Your taste is allowed to be embarrassing. Nobody ever found themselves by liking only what’s cool.

A taste assembled entirely out of what is approved tells you nothing about yourself, because none of the choices were yours. The embarrassing enthusiasms are the informative ones; they survived without any social reward, which is how you know where they came from. Cool is a shared answer and therefore not an answer about you.

Keep one thing you love that you would not defend in public, and stop quietly deleting it from your library. Tell one friend about it this week and notice the relief. Most people are hiding something similar and waiting for permission to admit it.