If you’re given to listening to my parents, I was born old. As they would have you believe, while other children were running around, climbing the walls, finger painting, and eating dirt on a playground dare, I wouldn’t stand to be untidy, busying myself with winning spelling bees and trying to organize a discussion on the literary merits of the Berenstain Bears, drastically preferring the classroom to the playground.

I’m willing to admit that some of my earliest memories are of finding the chaos of other children truly puzzling or even scary sometimes, and I found my peace by escaping from that world into stories with people and events that made sense and had purpose.

So I was a typical non-typical nerdy kid, finding most of my friends on the other side of a page or a screen, at least for a few years, until I managed to find other weirdos who were already focusing their attentions and passions at the same books, games, and movies as I was. My new friends in meat-space even helped me find more worlds to explore and people to meet back on the pages and pixels where I was comfortable. They introduced me to other forms of media like board games, card games, and the tabletop, new spaces where we could find each other and ourselves in new ways.

When eventually I found college looming on the horizon, and had to decide what to do with my life, having possessed at that point at least enough self awareness and understanding of the world to know that state university didn’t offer degrees in either wizardry or vigilante justice, I decided to settle for engineering and computer science, because if I had to live in a world without magic and superpowers, at least I could help work towards space colonies and AI assistants.

If I had slowed down to think about this decision, perhaps my preference for science fiction about space wizards over detailed FTL mechanisms would have clued me in sooner. The next several years consisted mostly of software engineering, meetings, management certifications, data analysis, teleconferences, executive training, the color, life, and last vestiges of magic draining from the world. And this led me to spending nearly all of my free time fleeing the world of science facts for the freedom of fictions and fantasies both old and new.

I woke up one day with a doctor giving me some new labels. I wasn’t born old, I was never a typical non-typical, and I hadn’t been just a weird kid.

On my journey to reevaluate and reinvent “normal,” I kept finding new ways to understand myself and others on the other side of a page, a screen, or a table top, in shared stories and fantastic worlds. I came to realize that I could be a wizard and a scientist and a superhero. I realized that I could make whole worlds, shape their mysteries, and decide their fates, and that maybe I could provide a place for other people to find new friends, each other, and maybe even themselves.