Plenty of people have “living in small towns” stories. Most of them concern either their repressed sexuality or their abandonment of the local religion and ethos. There is one aspect that I haven’t found occurs very often, at least to be released in public: growing up geek and nerd in a small town. It completely and utterly shaped me to be who I am today, and, although my neuroses are small in number, this is one of the things that I’m still battling. I’m not completely confident in my geek personality and presenting these aspects to others.  Let me share a bit of my past with you.

I am the daughter of a sci-fi loving nerd chemist and a Southern belle athlete. I received mix signals as to which was better for me to sharpen, my mind or my body. In elementary school I attempted to accomplish both; I played sports my mom coached and maintained an all A average to placate my dad. I won every academic award to be had at the end of quarters. I would sometimes win athletic events on field days as well. I liked Star Wars figurines, playing with F-15 jet models, and imagined I would be an artist in the military one day (odd, I know). Something happened in the fifth grade, though. One day I arrived at school as though it was any other day. I received a note – a hate note – revealing all of the students opinions of me. I was arrogant, selfish, not fun to be around, and they never wanted to talk to me ever again. Everyone was in on this. I was flat-out ignored. When I sat down at a table, kids would automatically move. My two best guy friends in my neighborhood would not play with me anymore. I completely lost all social connections I had but I couldn’t figure out as to why. Looking back, kids are just mean like that. They never like the person who’s number one. But when I was 10, I was devastated. This launched me into a years-long depression that was difficult to survive.

I sought solace in media. I spent hours on the internet every day roleplaying in MUDs and Yahoo! chat rooms. I obsessed about Sailor Moon, the perfect story of finding love and a group of friends who would never betray you. Japanese culture became a part of me. I watched a Star Wars every Friday night. In middle school I thought I could have a little bit of a fresh start, since not everyone from my elementary school would be there. So I started changing my personality to be one at home and one in public (although at home, I still ended up getting the “you’re a weird person for liking these things” from my family, so I ended up spending most time in my room alone). I acted stupider than I was. I changed my highly-developed articulate conservations to using the word “like” in every sentence, changing my “why’s” to “how comes,” and using nothing that had more than 7 letters. Words I knew I pushed to the back of my mind. My goal was to make friends, not to impress. And guess what? It worked. I had a solid group of core friends ranging from band to drama to the basketball team. Everyone liked me more. I never changed the way I maintained my all A’s, but I never answered questions in class, I slouched in my desk, I sat in the back with the cool kids.

High school was no different. I maintained this charade. People didn’t know what anime was, and if I tried to explain it to them, they would just taunt me for liking something so “gay.” I poured myself into extracirrcular activities to disprove my weirdness. Band, ROTC, drama, National Honor society – I would only reveal one mask of myself to these people. No one knew my propensity for Batman or Stargate. I never told anyone I knew HTML and CSS, that I had started building websites out of my own curiosity with coding. Although I attempted to bring some culture, e.g. dressing in Japanese street fashions, I was met with resistance. The high school’s culture was football, wrestling, hunting, and being good ole Christian boys. All the girls dyed their hair blond, wore Abercrombie & Fitch, and spent their time obsessing over the boys. So I just went along with being the person who countered their culture without too much shake-up. It cost me a heavy toll, though. I threw away my anime merchandise. I ripped down Asian decor in my bedroom. I stopped drawing all my anime characters. I thought to myself, “Only babies like these kinds of things.” Morphing myself into something that society wanted seemed to be more important than my being myself.

College provided a respite from practice of hiding myself. I was so engrossed in my becoming a great artist and philosopher that  my geeky hobbies never came up in conversation. I never had time to think about it. Plus, by then, it had become second-nature to not tell anyone I’m into video games. That would make me not normal. That would make me ashamed. Luckily I had moved away from my small town to a place I knew no one at. This both facilitated and hindered the process of becoming comfortable.

Now that I’ve graduated and been in the workforce for a couple of years, I’m having to reacquaint myself with myself. I do not have school to distract me, with my always trying to get an A on a test or in a class. I do not have things to deviate me from my thinking about my geeky hobbies. I don’t just have “college” friends anymore. I need to have a common ground with people to base a friendship upon. And, well, it’s been really hard. I’m allowing myself to love Sailor Moon just as much as I did when I was 12. Permissions have been granted for having conversations with people in public about the latest Left for Dead 2 campaign. The things that I love are becoming more intertwined with pop culture. I can go to the Books-a-Million in my small home town, and it will be stocking both manga and comic books. I have Batman games and novels to satisfy my lust. More people are spending time on the internet, making my current level of usage look “light.”

There’s still a part of me fighting, though. I still feel shame if someone “normal” sees my Sailor Moon keychain or hears I’m going to a geek convention and costuming. In talking with less nerdy people than me, my verbiage will indicate that I’m not as into the things I’m into. It’s been a huge struggle. I sure as hell can’t be who I am at work, which is where I’m at most of my time. Who I am is not what people expect when they see me. My portfolio site, and this blog in particular, are my attempts to put my “real” personality out there. I want to be in environments where I feel completely comfortable – that it’s ok for me to talk 15 minutes on Greek mythology. That it is cool I know how to assemble a computer. I might be overcompensating with how much nerdiness I am revealing, but I can’t stop it. Once I start talking about a game, reading a comic, or working on a costuming project, I realize how happy I feel, and I think, “This can’t be bad for me.”

I am building a group who give me their full support and continually say, “Don’t be ashamed.” But the shame still creeps in naturally. It’ll be a long time until that’s gone.