NerdCon Stories: The Small Miracles
I was born June 24th 1982 in a suburb of Pennsylvania. I was the last of two children that my parents had. I was raised in Pennsylvania my entire life. I was raised Catholic. I was taught to respect adult and listen when I was being given direction. When I was in 3rd grade I was diagnosed with ADD, though my whole life I struggled with focusing in class and had trouble relating to the other children in my class. When I was a teenager my parents’ divorced, but my father had stopped contributing to my childhood by the time I started school. My mother has always been my ally and when I was in high school we started to become really close. It wasn’t until I was 23 that I moved out with my now husband. I got married in 2007 and have two kids, 6 and 3. This is my story, yet there is so much more to me than my past. Like I can tell you about the time that I spent being involved the Missoula Children’s Theater or the time I fell down a flight of stairs and bruised my hind quarters possibly broke my coccyx but still went into work. Both of these stories add to the equation that is Me. We all have many stories. Stories are us. We are our stories. But we are also the stories of others. We can be characters in the stories of others, we can be deeply affected by the stories of others. Stories matter because stories make up what matters most about the experiences of everything and everyone. From the story you tell when you meet an new person to the stories we will tell our great grandchild. Stories bring us together, they make us laugh, the make us cry, (if they are really exceptional they do both) and nowhere did this become cleared to me then during the time that I spent at the Minneapolis Convention Center for the second ever NerdCon: Stories. This was my first year because despite my strong desire to go in 2015, money is a thing. I will admit that I am not much of a reader so the majority of the special guests at this convention where completely unknown to me. The thing that got me there was a combination of being a hardcore Nerdfighter and having a group of friends that were also going. But I was completely blown away by the experience. Every presenter had a genuine love for being there. It was more like getting to observe a really creative and intelligent group of good friends hang out together (side note: being there with my own group of really creative and intelligent friends paralleled the con itself) The presenters and the audience were equally the embodiment of unironic enthusiasm. This is gonna start sounding a bit religious, bear with me, but it genuinely felt like the presenters and audience were in communion together. There was no real notion of celebrity to get in the way of authentic human interaction. Each panel, live show or workshop I went to felt like I belonged there and that I was getting to witness some small miracle of the human experience. From the collective agreement of the audience to create hand symbols during Superfight, to the instant fame of the ASL interpreters, to the raw honesty of John Green’s speech on mental health. I really got to see some amazing miracles develop before my eyes. This life is soo amazing and NerdCon Stories takes all this and encapsulates it into two amazing days of sheer creative genius. It is true that it is difficult to market something as ethereal as the miracle of the human experience but that is exactly what makes this convention so important, so special and soooo sooo very necessary. Because in this world, in todays world, it is so easy to see the horrible, terrible and angry side of what the world can be. But to be able to collect people into a space that prove that life is more than what Fox News would have us believe… That is necessary. To make people feel like their story matters, because IT DOES. (PLEASE TELL THE WORLD YOUR STORY), to show people like me that being creative is not just a hobby that you should keep quiet about and to show the world that being creative and having mental health issues not one in the same. (You are not creative because of your mental health, you are creative in spite of it.. and you deserve to take care of yourself for your not suffer for it.) To do all this in the space of one weekend….
I have gone to VidCon twice now, and despite it always being a wonderful and meaningful experience, it has never even come close to communicating half the life changes messages that came from experiencing NerdCon: Stories.
And that is the hardest part of selling this Con, you really have to be there to understand how important it is. There is no other way to know than to experience it. And now that I have, I pray that it will happen again next year because it has served to rejuvenate my creative spirit and my faith in the good of humanity. People are good. Stories matter. I pray we can work together to make the convention happen every year. And I hope someday you get to experience the miracle of NerdCon: Stories.
