( Note : Due to circumstances too dull to go into right now, there will be no Friday Science Roundup today. Perhaps tomorrow. No guarantees. }

This article is the first in what I hope will be a series of open letters to my fellow nerds addressing things I think that we need to talk about, as a subculture and as a subset of the general population. Or at the very least, things I very much want to say to my neridsh cohorts.

The first thing I want to say to my fellow nerds is this : you are not an alien.

Nor are you an elf, a dragon, an angel, an immortal demigod, or any of the other attractive but entirely fictional subgroups that appeal to our deep nerd natures and resonate with our deepest pain.

Due to the criminally abusive childhood most of us faced, filled with bullying, social isolation, and a society that sees us as the lowest of the low simply for the crime of being intelligent, sensitive, and awkward, many of us wind up with an intellectual rich but emotionally and socially desperately impoverished upbringings which leave deep emotional wounds in our minds then never entirely heal.

Instead, they become deep scars, so deep, in fact, that they distort all our development and end up forming the skewed foundation of our lives well into our adult years.

And part of this terrible inheritance is a deep desire for a place where we will fit in. Not fitting in is more than a mild inconvenience for a human being. We are tribal creatures, down to the very core of our natures. We need an accepting social group in order to be happy and feel secure. A lot of us nerds use the sour grapes defense and claim we don’t need it or even want it, such rugged intellectual loners are we, but that’s bullshit, we all feel it, we are all hurt by it, and we differ only in how we try to cope with it.

Some become true loners, members of a gregarious species that, tragically, have come to see their fellow human beings as more threat than solace and seek to distance themselves from their own species in order to reduce the perceived threat level.

Some find their peer group online, where the magic of the Internet allows even those with the most personal and obscure intellectual interests cn usually find at least a small group of people who feel the same. The importance of the company of like-minded individuals cannot be overstressed.

Others find a place in more formal online communities. I think part of the massive, life-draining appeal of World of Warcraft and its host of cohorts is that it takes the online community and adds the ability to be part of a team, with a role, a job, that the system assures will be at least minimally rewarded (you get experience points no matter what) and which can furthermore be recognized by one’s clan and provide that thing that modern society rarely provides us nerds : a tribe where we belong.

But for some of the worst cases of social isolation. the only conclusion they can draw from the massive trouble they have relating to their fellow human beings is that, somehow, despite their appearance, biology, and all the other factors they share with their species, they are not, in fact, human.

Generally, this conclusion is reached tentatively at first, but strengthened immensely once the individual find, in their beloved fictions, a group which resonates with them. Elves, dragons, werewolves, androids, Klingons… the possibilities are endless. Suddenly, there is a single light in the darkness. The fact that these groups are fictional is no barrier at all. Many of us inhabit the world between our ears far more than the one outside out skulls, and in there, the difference between imaginary things and real things can sometimes seem very small indeed, and the fictional often seems better.

And it’s not so big a leap, given enough imagination and enough pain, to imagine, fleetingly or very seriously, that despite outward appearances, we are not human beings. There is another group, somehow ‘discovered’ by the writer(s) of the fiction, where the individual truly belongs. A group where they would be accepted for who they are, not meant to feel like dirt because they don’t fit in. Their true tribe.

Most of us, of course, do not take this sort of thinking to the point of developing a mental illness like dissociative identity disorder or species dysphoria. But I think this feeling that we are not entirely human lurks in the minds of all nerds, and this troubles me.

For the sad truth is that we are not aliens, merely alienated, which to me is a far more tragic fate than being a stranded alien or a reincarnated werewolf. The fact that we human beings can be so damaged by social deprivation in childhood that we feel like we do not even belong to our own species speaks volumes to the silent tragedy of the “normal” way nerds have been treated for many generations.

If you are reading these words, you are human. You may not feel human, but that does not make it any less true. The sun still shines on a blind man who cannot see it.

And as tempting as these fictional alternatives may seem, the only true salvation for the socially damaged human will be found with your fellow human beings. There is no substitute, no replacement, no pill to take to heal the wounds and fill that deep dark void inside caused by the hunger within for connection with others.

You have to learn to forgive humanity, and try to learn to get along.