Confessions of a Closeted Nerd

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Is there a part of your personality you try to suppress?

Right now, for the first time in my life, I don’t think there is a part of mine that I’m trying to hide. But it hasn’t always been this way.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a nerd. I like Star Trek. I like comic books. I collected action figures far past the age when people would’ve told me that I was “too old“ for that. Growing up, I probably spent more time indoors than I did outdoors.

In junior high and in high school, I would’ve described myself as a “closet nerd.“ I didn’t sit around with kids at school and talk about my personal interests. Yeah, maybe there were a few people—like the apostle—who knew. But beyond that, I kept it close to the vest. I knew that if the other kids found out how heavily into comic books and action figures I still was, they would’ve made my life a living hell.

That’s one thing I talk about a lot with both other teachers and with parents: I think kids today are a hell of a lot more tolerant of each other than we were in my generation. I see this primarily when I talk about the way that mainstream students regard special needs students. It’s not like it was in my day, when special ed classes were almost entirely self-contained.

Back then, I was constantly worried. What would girls have thought? What would the cool kids have thought? Looking back, it really didn’t matter. First, because that social hierarchy doesn’t mean anything once you’re out of high school. Second, it didn’t matter because I was virtually ignored by those people anyway. I was hiding for an audience that wasn’t even watching.

Today, it’s actually cool to be a nerd. Look at a show like The Big Bang Theory. That was an enormously successful television series, and those guys were geeks. They read comic books and talked about Star Trek. That series was littered with nerd culture references constantly—and by the way, the comedy writers were quite accurate with a lot of those references.

Then, of course, there was the whole Marvel phenomenon. The MCU was so undeniably successful that even mainstream people started getting into it. It became cool to like comic book characters. We started seeing kids in high schools wearing backpacks with characters like the Transformers or the Avengers.

There’s a bit in the 21 Jump Street movie when Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) realizes, “Man, I would’ve been so cool if I was born 10 years later!” In the movie, Schmidt was a nerd in high school but would’ve been a social butterfly had he been born a decade later. On the flip side, Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) was a jock who seems pretty anonymous when they go undercover in a modern high school.

The world is a much different place in 2026 than it was in 1992 when I graduated. Sure, I’m 51 years old now and I have the wisdom of experience to have developed better self-esteem. But like Schmidt, I do think that I would’ve been thought of as a lot “cooler“ in high school had I been born ten years later with the interests that I have.

The difference now is that I’ve stopped looking for the “cool kids” to tell me what’s acceptable. I’ve spent enough time hiding my interests to last a lifetime. Whether the world thinks it’s cool to be a nerd in 2026 doesn’t actually change who I am—it just makes it easier to breathe. I’m done with the closet. This is just me.

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