Growing up is a hard and confusing time, especially when you’re a preteen just trying to figure out what you’re like, there are just so many options and opportunities to choose from, and for some kids it just feels like you are at a fork in the road with different likes and dislikes on each path. For everyone that fork is different, and for me one path had everything geeky and nerdy; a love for Marvel movies and everything fantasy adventure, a growing interest in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, and an endless supply of Doctor Who quotes in my head (RIP Superwholock). The other path was full of fashion, chick flicks, and the secret to a perfect winged eyeliner. As a preteen it felt like I could only choose one path and I had to stick with that, but as I grew up I realized just how stupid it was to do that, like why couldn’t I have a bomb red lip while I would use Scorching Ray to decimate some goblins in Dungeons and Dragons.
Choosing one over the other just lowers the quality and variety of one’s experiences. For some reason growing up, I noticed there would be a stigma if somebody had an “opposite” like or dislike, even though one like doesn’t cancel out another. Why is it that I remember a time where people I knew who liked superheroes and fantasy also had an aversion to makeup on principle or that if I, who was known as someone very “feminine”, would have to prove myself in my nerdiness and had to recount all the movies I had interest in over the years and that I accurately knew the information about all of them.
Luckily as I went through my youth I would meet a variety of people who thought similarly and as a group, by passers could hear us change topics from how awesome and bad ass we thought Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones was, but then next thing you know we would talk about how to have some bomb eyebrows for the upcoming prom. In my first Dungeons and Dragons campaign, which was majority male except for the dungeon master and me, the boys would get whiplash from seeing us go from the best way to design a sorcerer and then change to the best way to rock a dark lip with minimum smudging. Even now in my current Dungeons and Dragons campaign, itis full of the people I grew up learning to love for their variety of interests, and they love me for mine. There is only support among us in our judgment-free zone, because in a supportive friend group friends do not judge each other for the things they love doing and I’m so grateful for finding these people so early on in my life.
So, this is for the preteens growing up feeling that they can only choose one path, without realizing all paths are intertwined and it’s more fun to have the best of both worlds. Don’t let anyone make you feel like one like is exclusive of anything else because that is just unrealistic. This isn’t Mean Girls where they somehow found a way to categorize everyone in the school, people aren’t two dimensional, we are three-dimensional with three-dimensional personalities. So, do it. Be the athlete, band kid, fashionista, makeup guru, and nerd; do it and embrace all the new opportunities and people that will come out from it and enrich your lifestyle, you won’t regret it.