It started long before I can remember but for what I can, it has always been there. Maybe it started with late nights on an old black and white TV. I’d placed it in the corner of my bedroom and every night I would crawl under an old Raggedy Anne and Andy blanket after my parents had gone to sleep and watch old British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) reruns of “Red Dwarf,” “Dr. Who” and “Are you Being Served?”Or maybe it started when I learned how to disguise thousand page novels; sitting in the back of classrooms, to avoid being caught reading at the age of 10; spending hours in the library learning basic sign language and studying the love affairs of Czarist Russia at 14. My teachers tried to diagnose me with an attention disorder instead of admitting they were not teaching me.
Or perhaps it was the moment, when my parents realized their 12-year-old daughter listened to Doo Wop and big band music instead of Hip Hop and had a crush on Harry Belafonte. My first compact disc was Cab Calloway’s greatest hits and later I would look longingly at Billie Holiday’s complete Decca recordings. I can’t rightly tell you the moment I stopped being able to converse with my peers about popular culture or cared more about bookstores and video games than boys and clothes but perhaps I have just always been a nerd.
Somewhere along the line, I, along with many others, embraced nerdiness. So it was, and still is, that my perspective of the world, like many other nerds, is vastly different; for vastly different reasons than the people I grew up with up. Now, thirty, single and a public policy professional with three degrees, I don’t regret a single night of ruining my eyes reading or watching Dr. Who, a single day of sneezing from sifting through old vinyl, or any of the random history facts of failed monarchies or telecommunications law that I can talk about for hours. Yes, I do think that spectrum is fascinating.
Somewhere along the line, I, along with many others, embraced nerdiness. So it was, and still is, that my perspective of the world, like many other nerds, is vastly different; for vastly different reasons than the people I grew up with up. Now, thirty, single and a public policy professional with three degrees, I don’t regret a single night of ruining my eyes reading or watching Dr. Who, a single day of sneezing from sifting through old vinyl, or any of the random history facts of failed monarchies or telecommunications law that I can talk about for hours. Yes, I do think that spectrum is fascinating.For all these reasons I am who I am, have come so far in life and I have so much further to go. Still, I am not alone and I believe that this most beautiful irony of it all. It has taken me three decades to embrace but at 30 there is no looking back. You see, as nerds, our combined differences continue to bind us together. In every walk of life, every field of study there is an undeniable bond connecting us into a web, an interconnected nerdy microcosm of “common uniqueness.“ Whether it started with comic books, bird watching, role playing, video games or an extreme obsession with anime we all connect at some point in a shared desire to exist as who we are; unapologetically nerdy.
