A Nerd's Awakening

This is the story of when I realized it was ok to be myself. Enjoy!

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Every day at a place I thought was home in the averagetown burbs, with an identical twin sister, and my mom and dad, I felt like I had a neon sign on my back displaying, “goat”. This term represented being the center of negative attention. I’m about to go chill at my friend’s place and decided to wear pink leggings, blue shorts with cherries, a Five Finger Death Punch shirt, an ear full of metal and an armful of bling, the family points and laughs. My mom says, “Are you really going to go out in public like that”. I reply, “um, yeah?!?” I then storm out the door and slam it shut, never looking back, wondering what I did to make myself the black sheep.

Being an identical twin almost means two people, one soul. I still get called by my sister’s name by those who don’t even know I have an identical twin sister named Rachel. But how do you find your own identity by having the same friends, doing the same sports and activities for the most part, going to the same college, even choosing the same major, and never having any room to find yourself? At least having the initials “RAD” is pretty rad, even though they aren’t unique…

From my endless amounts of experiences, long list of hobbies, and trying to fill every moment and every person around me with color, I’ve learned that life is a story. You are the main character. Each adventure you take marks another chapter in your book. You can choose to either have 15 pages, 100 pages, or even a thousand pages. As for me, I like to venture into distant lands.

When I went to college, like everyone else, I wanted to find my home and people to call my family, since I abide by the phrase, “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. It was also a time for me to shake the neon sign and pray a trail of the ill colored light didn’t decide to follow me. For most of my life, most of my friends have been men. Even growing up, I was best friends with a man named Kyle who inspired me to proceed down the path of nerddom. With the strong desires to bring some women into my life, I decided to go Greek. A major goal of the Greek system is to recruit members, but what if you’re indirectly assigned the role of the water boy instead of being able to talk to people? We would be in the Circus Room of the Student Center, tables set up all eloquently, about 50 women decorated fully and sporting their nicest lettered shirts, sitting at tables in their poses, and trying to convince women to join the sorority. My goal was to authentically see if the woman’s values fit with mine and would fit with what the sorority would want in a reputable person. Apparently, all that got me doing was serving finger sandwiches and water to my sisters and the pnms aka “potential new members”, and getting yelled at for checking my phone during voting while my mom was telling me my great aunt had just been admitted to the hospital.  By the end of the day, I was left out on the street to fend for myself, and don’t really talk to any of my “sisters” at this point in time. The last time I was invited anywhere was to someone’s birthday party, which just so happened to be on the same day as “Belegarth day event” (where you fight and converse during the day only and don’t camp overnight). I yearned for some real friends in my life because I sure didn’t find many in college.

After four years away from the nest, it was time to fly home again. Almost 2 months after getting back, I was introduced to a world of the nerd club, singing pirates, hitting people with foam weapons, campfires, camaraderie, medievalness, lots of food, and even the Mystery Machine? My friend Josh I met in the IT department at school, offered me a ride to the local “nerd club” practice in Elgin, IL. I accepted his offer, showed up in my workout clothes, and had no idea what I was getting myself into. After the schpeal of “Welcome to the Belegarth Medieval Combat Society” and being told the rules, I was handed a foam sword, a foam shield, and told to go get em. I ended up beating 1 person, which was an accomplishment for me. Plus, people were drawing conversations with me and seemed interested in me. Flabbergasted like a 5 year old who missed several social cues throughout life, to myself, I was like “what, you want to be my friend”, and awhile later, start screaming to myself, “they like me, they really like me!”. After the practice was over, everyone present went to go get Mexican food as usual, and talked as if we had known each other forever. From then on, I knew I was hooked.

Once I joined Belegarth, the neon sign fell off. I looked at it, stomped it on the ground, and glided forward. I learned how the bullying stopped once I fully accepted myself. Bullying is very real, and went on for me from about age 3 to age 23 in some form or another. But that’s not going to stop the warrior side from taking over. All of the times I was told to go get em, I told myself I needed to rise from the scars of my past, including the ones I have to wear every day. I also needed to tell myself finding a home in the stars was possible. After an encounter with the magic jester god, he introduced me to the holder of the stars named Kabii. The first time I saw the fellowship of Selonia, once I reached my “official” 1 year anniversary of being in Belegarth, I was welcomed into camp with a giant hug machine, apple pie drink inside of a skull, more food than I can stomach, and 6am ventures of laughing, crying, and seeing the sun come up around a campfire. I was welcomed into the fellowship and plan on placing my turkey stamp and cooking parades this year where my home away from Chicago is, Davenport, Iowa.

After many years, it looks like this program finally runs. Finding your home is actually possible as long as you are willing to keep putting yourself out there with grace and pride. When I ask myself what I could have done to become the black sheep, the answer is nothing. All I did was be myself every time and fight those who try to stop me. For those of you who struggle with being different, you are never alone. Being yourself is something to never be frowned or ridiculed upon, because nowadays, nerd is the new cool! I love being a nerd. Do you?

Why Being a Nerd is Empowering

Why being a nerd is empowering… because being "me" gives lots and lots of stories! Why? Because I enjoy adventures!

I mainly tell my stories about how it feels to be different and how it’s empowering to be yourself, how I overcame previous challenges of being picked on frequently for being different, and I exclaim why people should never give up through (spoken word) poetry, which I’ve been writing poetry for about 7-8 years now. I post all of my poetry and writing endeavors, healthy recipes I’ve created, and much more on my blog that I have been actively working on for the past 2 years.

I have always been a nerd for as long as I can remember, but didn’t start embracing it until towards the end of my college career. I can also definitely say that on the outside, you won’t be able to tell how nerdy I am until you start talking to me because I generally dress pretty girly with my own flair of course. I started watching anime with my friend who lived on the same block and my twin sister when I was 10. We would pretend to act as the protagonist female characters Dragonball Z and go running around the playground pretending to shoot lasers from our hands. I was designated to be “Maron”, which that name is still carried with me to this day, along with my love for anime. I also just went to my first major anime convention this past May and I had a blast!

When I was 12, my best friend at the time and his older brother introduced me to web development and shortly after, my first website, “Anime Luvers”, was successfully launched with much assistance from my friend and his brother. From that point, I knew I wanted to be a web developer for the rest of my life, not even being aware that you can make good money and it’s very male-dominated. I went on to study web development at Illinois State University, graduated in May, 2013, and have now been at my job as a web developer for about a year now. I can’t see myself not doing web development or IT in some way for the rest of my life because I love it so much. Up until my college graduation, I was always a band geek and did band from 5th grade until the end of college, was a member of the anime club in high school, was a founder of the video game/DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) club in high school, played DDR actively, and was even the president of the club for IT majors during my senior year of college. I am currently very professionally involved in my field and have done my fair share of peer mentoring. I have also advocated to and inspired women on why they should pursue an IT or STEM career despite being a vast minority, been a professional mentor to 2 Illinois State University students in the IT department, presented an awards ceremony to high school girls who were being honored for their achievements in IT, and went to my high school to speak about why being in the IT field and a web developer are tons of fun!

After my college graduation, I was having a rough time transitioning into “adult life” and didn’t really have too many friends at home. My relationship with my family was also extremely rocky at the time, which was making the transition worse. On May 25, 2013, my best childhood friend who inspired me to be a web developer, passed away at the age of 22, 3 weeks before I started my career. His strong work ethic and passion for web development and nature will be in my heart until eternity! Without him, I don’t even want to know where else I’d be today because I am beyond happy with my decision to be a web developer!

Unfortunately in college, I became overweight because I gained a bit more than the freshman 15 in college… more like the college 60! A good friend of mine, who I met trying to recruit him into the IT club I ran in college, ended up taking me to a “belegarth” practice this past July. Belegarth is a boffer combat sport where you basically hit nerds with sticks and is very closely related to LARPing. He kept telling me how the people that he fought closely with in his “fighting unit” are basically his family and he always spoke so highly of them. After the very first practice, I was instantly hooked and have never looked back since. I had never been exposed to such a welcoming and nurturing community and was excited to continue attending practices and eventually go camping with everyone! In October, 2013, I met the person who ultimately ended up changing my life... not prince charming yet unfortunately, but the man who is now a dear friend of mine that’s been leading me towards living a happier and healthier lifestyle. I knew I had wanted to lose the weight for awhile and had several failed attempts at losing the weight. I ended up pursuing karate again as of January, 2014, which I had quit previously for about 5.5 years. Now, thanks to getting introduced to LARPing and it being an activity where you run around a lot, I am less than 2 belts away from black because I went back to the same karate school I was at before and was able to pick up from where I left off, I’m happier than ever and healthier than ever, and around 60 pounds since January, 2014 (basically all the weight I gained in college) and still going strong to attain the most optimal lifestyle possible. All of these positive changes and weightloss journey successes are thanks to being a nerd and being surrounded by other nerds where we can all embrace being totally weird together.

How is being a nerd empowering to you? Feel free to share or post your story somewhere :)

6 Misconceptions People Have Towards LARPing

Before I say anything, first off, LARP means live action role play, and if you're wondering if I take part of any of this, yes, I absolutely do. I am a part of a group called "Belegarth Medieval Combat Society", which is actually more of a boffer combat sport with some optional LARPing aspects involved. Similar games to this include Dagorhir and Amtgard, but there are plenty of groups like this all over the world!

To those of you who are going to pre judge any sort of LARPing game or boffer combat sport before actually trying it, these are some comments I've heard from people when I'd go to tell them about these activities, as well as what I've heard from the grapevine in general:

1. "This is really stupid..."

If you haven't done any of this before and think you can sit there calling it stupid and go judging away, you have no right. If you genuinely dislike these types of things, so be it, but you have no right to judge anyone just for wanting to have fun in an extremely nerdy fashion. You also can't just assume something sucks based on rumors. To be honest, when I saw the club practicing at my college, I basically just glanced and walked away because I cared what other people would think about me because I'd be doing something as "different" as this. It looked kind of silly, and I thought all of the people were a bunch of weirdos, despite not knowing a single one of them. One day last summer, a dear friend of mine who was in the club at school invited me to a practice around where I live at home because he was in town for the summer and it decided to give it a fair chance. Little did I know that deciding to give this a fair chance would be one of the best decisions I've made to this day. Being a part of this sport, let alone massive community of awesomeness and nerds, has made an immensely positive impact  on me... in just a year! I have been meeting the most genuine people I've ever seen in my entire life and I am eternally thankful I was introduced to this. The moral of the story is that you never know until you try and you can't judge a book by its cover to assume that something is going to be totally weird (in a bad way) until you've picked up a sword or at least talked to someone who's in it to determine whether or not you're interested!

2. "Everyone who participates uses this as some kind of escape and does drugs"

This was mostly brought up by family members who are clearly unsupportive of me, but this is definitely false, especially the part about drugs. The sport I do is actually more of a boffer combat sport and not "LARPing" unless you do roleplaying on your own. I can see why people would think this is some kind of an escape because you dress up in medieval garb in the middle of the park and hit people with foam sticks. For me, going to practices and events are just "a trip to happy land" for me because I'm consistently surrounded by good people and am always happy every time I attend any kind of function for it. Also, with being in an organization that's on many college campuses, drinking and drugs do happen in college. Not only that, but hanging out with these people is much safer than going to fraternity parties because people legitimately care about your safety and everybody watches out for everybody. If you're new to the game as well, people keep an extra special eye on you (during the night life part of the game) to make sure that you're happy and want to continue coming back. Plus, good luck doing drugs and going on the fighting field... you'd be a useless blob!

3. "These people are all losers... go meet more 'professional people'"

As much as this awesomeness is not resume worthy (in most cases), I have learned more life skills by being in this sport than any of the other activities I did in college... yes, this includes being the president of the club for IT majors during my senior year of college. Luckily, any leadership experience you gain in school seems to translate very well for this. Being a part of a group like this has exposed me to people who come from all walks of life, ranging from male nurses to college students to web developers to teachers to iron workers to holistic doctors and everything in between. I'm sorry if you think that the only way to be successful is sitting in an office at your lovely 9-5 job doing whatever and climbing up the corporate ladder or working some white collar job in your field of study from school... because it's not. I'm also sorry if you think that people need to always be "normal" all the time and do "normal" activities, like volunteering, joining a group to meet new people and discuss the world, and being involved in professional organizations in your field, which I do anyways. Not only that, but just because I make one bad group of friends, realize it pretty quickly, and get rid of them doesn't mean I'm going to be foolish enough to make the same mistake again. These people who you may consider "losers" have real jobs, can support themselves, and some even are married and have families. Of course, you may find a couple worms in your giant basket of apples, but we are all the same people as everyone else with as much or more life ambition than you have. We just have different tastes in our hobbies than you do!

4. "Everyone is really, really weird"

Weird... what even is weird? I feel like weird is the new cool and creepy is the new weird. And who cares if we're all weird anyways? We're having fun, and that's all that should matter! If you get to know these people on the inside instead of staring at the medieval garb they're wearing, you'll realize that you're meeting some pretty interesting people with nice stories to tell who are very far from fake! I'd also be kind of bored if all of my friends had "typical jobs" and did "typical, non-weird activities" because being different is fun and not being typical is and should be the new norm! This is a type of community you won't be able to find anywhere else and I am thankful to now be a part of something as wonderful as this! So think twice if you think these people are all "weird", because that's just a false generalization!

5. "Go do something better with your time"

...says the person who sits on the couch every waking moment watching TV. Hey, at least I'm doing something fun, spending time with some of the most wonderful people I've ever met, and in my case, am getting tons of exercise. Thanks to this awesomeness (and of course eating right, further exercise, etc.), I've been able to lose over 30 pounds so far. You're probably just jealous that I'm having so much fun all the time and found something I'm truly passionate about besides for my career, music, writing, and karate! Yeah, it's not an activity you'll hear your typical person say they do, but I work in an office and everyone I've told who I work with is super interested and fascinated by what I do. They always ask about it, especially when I return from a camping event (which I use vacation time to go). As long as you still manage to go to work every day, are doing something you love, and still have your eyes on the prize of success you're craving oh so much, just live your life and screw what other people think about how you spend your time!

Also, if you see some of the craftsmanship that's involved with making leather armor, making weapons, making garb, making chainmail, etc., all I have to say is HOLY CRAP! These people make beautiful works of art while putting hours and hours into what they do and I wish I can do that! Yes, people make their own stuff for this (and you can of course buy it too)!

6. "Go get real exercise because no one cares about being healthy"

With what I do (belegarth), running around and hitting people is actually a lot more difficult than it looks. In fact, you need a ton of coordination and endurance to stay fighting for a long time. Imagine being in the hot sun and running around hitting people for hours... if you don' t think "that" is exercise, then you go try! I've even hit a point where I'm trying to figure out how my karate skills can be used for this and vice versa! Water is always heavily promoted and people will always bring some (or sometimes bring giant coolers) to make sure you drink water! Worst case scenario, there will be a fountain or someone to share with you if you forget water because if you fight long enough, your body will tell you to drink water! Because of the possibility to obtain sports injuries, people will be on your butt if you complain about feeling injured, go fight full blast, and come off the field feeling worse... We want people to keep fighting, not be hurt!

Unfortunately, in terms of health consciousness, I have found that the population of people who want to be/eat healthy all the time seems to be a minority. I could be wrong, but that's what I've noticed... not just with this, but in general. Thankfully, everyone is extremely respectful of how you choose to eat. More importantly, if you have food allergies, especially at events, everyone is extremely wary and will not knowingly give you food that you're allergic to (but you need to tell them you're allergic of course). After practices, people like to go to McDonald's, a buffet, a burrito place, or anywhere that is seemingly unhealthy. If you don't choose to partake, your decision will not be made fun of at all. When I do go, it's a nice bonding experience and health conscious me over here just gets the least unhealthy thing on the menu that I can find so I can enjoy the company and not feel horrible about what I ate. Everyone is just very supportive in general. However, when you're at an event camping overnight for a few days and alcohol is involved, don't expect to have the best diet that weekend (and don't eat or drink too much either). I CAN say that because of doing this, I met the person who ended up inspiring me to reach my optimal health potential, so thank you belegarth for just helping me to become a better person in general (and healthier too of course)!

If your friends or even your family doesn't support you doing something like this, SO WHAT! It's their opinion, you're doing something that is SAFE, FUN, and MAKES YOU HAPPY. It may not be resume-worthy in most cases, but as long as you're HAPPY, that's all that should matter :)

For more information about what I do, be sure to check out http://www.geddon.org/Main_Page and like "Belegarth Medieval Combat Society" on Facebook :)