“Sci-fi nerds are respectful, honorable. You can trust them.” –Claudia Christian

“Being a nerd, which is to say, going too far and caring too much about a subject . . .” –Sarah Vowell

“We’re all nerds on one subject or another.” –Jonathan Lethem

Are you a nerd? Have you ever been one? Chances are in high school—and possibly in college—like myself, you witnessed the sectioning off of cliques. Cool kids and athletes in one group. The best dressed had their corner. Goths had the bench by the tree. Nerds, wherever they could find refuge.

Or maybe there was a nerd in every clique: The jock-nerd. The cheerleader nerd. The cool kid who was also heavily into comic books.

Often ostracized during painful coming-of-age years, nerds really get put through it. True to life, however, the nerd world is not a monolith. We come in all shapes and fashions.

Using your brain...not the worst thing you could do.

Take, for example, the socially inept nerd. Never the life of the party, this nerd cannot sustain the right balance of small talk and whatever she is nerdly obsessed over. At the homecoming dance she may share too much of her fascination with the sex lives of plants instead of chatting about who brought who—or she’ll be so unfashionably dressed and shy she’ll spend the dance alone.

Then there’s the Dungeons and Dragons nerd. This guy loves comic books and the world of sci-fi, possibly enough never to care about the opposite sex. One might find him at Comic-Con or watching reruns of the Lord of the Rings on TNT. He sports an appreciation for the fantastical and sleeps in line waiting for Star Wars tickets.

Embrace it...Feels better already, huh?

Computer geeks and the book smart come to mind when most folks think of the term nerd. Stereotypically they don pocket protectors and strut wicked skills at repairing your motherboard or tutoring you in physics.

Still, we all have our favorite nerds. And for those of us who endured high school life labeled as one, somewhere along the way we embrace our individuality and work it to our advantage. We wear it. Embrace nerd-dom.

The fraternity Lambda Lambda Lambda featured the best of all these categories (or combinations of them) in the movie Revenge of the Nerds—and in the end, they made everyone want to be nerds. In their words:

“No one’s really gonna be free until Nerd Persecution ends.”

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” –Audre Lorde

On Tuesdays we talked much about identity: the expression of it through values (Just a Nine to Five), just showing so much of it (Masking), challenging it (Complacency), finding out what matters most to it (Becoming a Master).

What is it, though, that makes the individual? How do we know when we are hearing our voice? What do those epiphanies look like, smell and feel like? Taste like? What prompts that saliva in the corners of your mouth, when you realize you’re on the cusp of owning yourself—world be damned.

Life is not a Malfunction Shirt: Respecting the Individual..

Our individuality—a must, because as social creatures we enjoy complements to ourselves and not clones—manifests itself in many aspects and not all at the same time: how we live, comb our hair, eat, work, raise our kids, relate to our families and partners. It can be artistic, social, cultural. We cultivate it to the point where we hear that drumbeat in everything we do.

And now I fear going too far in this post, because it is not a thing that can be explained—this expression of individuality or voice. How do I relate something that is like falling in love—what else could make us risk so much, make the rest of our

worlds seem so inconsequential?

I don’t intend to create a perfect picture here, a world where the self-possessed walk around with all the answers to life. By “individual” I don’t mean perfect. It has less to do with self-love, less to do with self-acceptance, even less to do with “living an artist’s life”—more to do with respecting your way and making sense of it, but not necessarily in having a set path. Great individuals have found their “calling” or “walked their walk” before they found themselves, god, security, acceptance or love (or acceptance of love). Or they find their voice and never find these other things; that laundry list is not a prerequisite to individuality.

I don’t want to make it sound like a linear process—“you accept yourself, you find your center, you find your voice.” Sometimes we’ll feel it more strongly. Other times we’ll wonder if it’s still there. If you work a nine-to-five as I do, you can’t express your individuality all day. Some conformity is needed to grease the machine. The principle is to keep that thread going. I have a daily grind, but it doesn’t stop me from scribbling writing ideas during the day or jotting a few lines on my lunch hour. Our power is in keeping that bass line going, not losing it. We keep that thread; we keep ourselves.