But the proof can't be made. If you’re conditioned to feel like an outsider, you’re going to believe the rejection is always lurking around the corner, and the acceptance is never real, never complete. You’ll remain in sullen sureness that outside is where you’ve been placed — or you’ll keep testing, poking and prodding for the thing you could do that’s horrible enough to prove that you were never really welcome.
The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.
It's not always about just being wounded. Many became "weird nerds" because they don't like the tons of bullshit, politics and signalling games mainstream society lives and breathes. You can't "fix" them without destroying who they really are.
If, by your own admission, you just don't like something, you can't claim that "who [you] really are" is being "destroyed" if you're taught how to avoid injury in dealing with it. Your pet peeves are not a part of you.
The point is, how do you know the difference between something that's "who you really are" and something that you simply feel discomfort around being asked to change?
I can't talk for all "weirdos", but let me tell you about my personal fears.
I fear that I will have to give up my intellectual honesty. I fear that I will have to start caring about politics (which I consider waste of time and something that shows the worst parts of our nature). I fear that I will have to start playing signalling games. I fear that I will have to censor my words and my thoughts, so that I don't express an opinion that is unpopular this week (winds on the Internet change fast). I fear that I will have to accept and participate in absurdity and irrationality I try so hard to stay away from.
I'm a very open, tolerant and accepting person. Just like every other "weird nerd" I know. But the crowd that tries to overwhelm us is not open, not tolerant, despite waving the banner of "diversity" and "equality". I fear I won't be allowed to be a nice, honest, decent person with interest in technology anymore.
What I hear you saying is you personally identify with what you perceive as intellectual honesty, what you perceive as rationality, and the freedom to say whatever you want without worrying whether listeners will like it.
The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.
I could go into the ways in which I eventually learned that challenges to my own intellectual honesty and rationality ended up strengthening them both once I stopped reacting to those challenges emotionally and started choosing to believe in the good will of the people making them. But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.
> The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.
I agree. Thanks for a reminder.
> But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.
I agree. I like diversity and equality. But diversity means allowing different groups to coexist, and to tolerate people with different opinions and outlooks on life. I don't see "weirdos" trying to impose their own worldview on everyone - on the contrary, it's them who are being forced to conform to the rest. That is not diversity.
And, I should be clear, for me as well. I happen not to have bad reactions to expressions of feminism - if I knew how I avoided that, believe me, I'd tell the world - but I carry those wounds from my childhood and they fuck up my life every day.
The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.