There I was in the middle of an intense battle on my rock fence with my G.I. Joes, when my neighbor who was around the same age as me walked up and said in a super judgy way, “Hey, aren’t those for kids? I mean, how old are you?”

I’m not gonna lie, I was embarrassed. I was in the 5th or 6th grade at the time, and sadly, she went as far as making fun of me at school for playing with toys. Everyone seemed to go along with her, and I began to think that maybe she was right. If everyone else felt that way, it must be something wrong with me, right?

After many different situations like this growing up, it continued to cement this type of theory. I got made fun of for playing D&D during lunch in junior high, doing art with my buds at lunch in high school, making puppets in my puppet class in college—all things some people thought I was either too old to be doing or somehow made me weird.

I tried to rebel, but I don’t think I truly felt comfortable doing whatever made me happy until I became an adult.

Even now, I sometimes get into my own head when I get dressed up, worrying that people are judging me like when I was younger.

What’s great about the geek community is that people don’t care about those types of things. It doesn’t matter as long as it makes you happy and you have fun doing it.

A lot of people, geek or not, have even turned back to their childhood, enjoying coloring books for adults. In fact, one of my friends I did art with during lunch in high school, Ben Walker-Storey, has been making his own coloring books for adults: BenWalkerArt.com