#NerdsUnite: On a Quest to Find my (Bat)manhood.
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Taco. (Funny how the important the word "buddy" is in that sentence.) We've been Facebook buds for sometime now, but he's about to embark on a personal quest and has asked to write about it. I only have one more thing left to say ... HIT IT TACO!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @Redknave
Call me Gideon Smith. Or Taco M. Ramirez. Or @redknave. Or call me by my birth given name, Younus Seddiq. I'm 23 years old and I'm pretty sure I'm considered a college drop out by now. My life had been slowly falling apart over the past few years; my grades in college were getting progressively worse and worse. I used to get mostly A's and B's, and now I was getting mostly D's and F's. Maybe a C if I was lucky. I kept feeling sick, throwing up at least once a week every summer for at least the past two years, every doctor I went to would blow it off and tell me that I was okay. My inability to talk to people brought on incredible loneliness. Talking to people makes me anxious as hell, to the point where I want to throw up, which seems to happen a lot in my life. I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder since I was five years old, and now it was getting worse. Things have always been chaotic in my house but shit hit the fan when my step-dad left my mom “out of nowhere”. And a year or two after that, my brother pulled a similar stunt. Suffice it to say, my mom didn't take it well, and made the house toxic to live in. Add to that the fact I was already suffering from PTSD so things went from shitty to hellish. So I did the only logical thing I could think of- I decided to become Batman.
Sometime in August of 2011 while watching a marathon of Avatar: The Last Airbender, something finally struck me: I feel like shit, almost all the time. Something's wrong with the way everything is, and I needed a change. I've tried changing things before, taking a semester off from college to get my head on right. But it never worked; it was always just a band-aid that would fall off after a week or two. For the longest while, my only sense of joy came from reading comics, specifically comics written by Grant Morrison. That man is a genius- a sexy, magical genius. He's been primarily writing Batman comics for the past 5 years now, and his characterization of the Batman is what got me thinking, “Why can't I get better?” People mostly characterize Batman as this dark, brooding man who hasn't quite gotten over his parent's death, but not Morrison. He paints Batman like someone who has survived the worst of it and only wants to help others, someone who is sane, in control of his emotions, and wants justice. There was something in there that spoke to me, and made me want to get better - if only to help others. To make sure whatever the hell I went through, others wouldn't have to.
I had to get out, but I had nowhere to go. None of my friends at the time had an apartment or place of their own; they were either still in college or living with their parents. I lucked out when someone I met on the Internet offered to help. Lilith70 (real name Dawn) was the moderator of a forum I used to frequent, and we had become phone-buddies. At this point we had been talking on the phone at least weekly -mostly about comics, quantum physics, feminism, and Batman (because everything in my life is somehow related to Batman). I decided to move from my mother’s New Jersey home to Dawn’s apartment in Texas the week after New York Comic-Con 2011. It was a drastic change and a big step but I felt that I needed to do something to put me off the path I was on. I moved from home 3 months ago, and I haven’t thrown up since.
Since I’ve gotten here I’ve done work to get better, not only emotionally and physically but as a writer as well. I eat food on a regular basis, and people can touch my shoulders without me wanting to punch them in the face or running away. I’ve only had a few breakdowns since I’ve been here versus weekly breakdowns back in Jersey. And like Batman, trying to perfect my writing. Sure, he left to Gotham City to fight crime, and didn’t really leave to learn proper grammar and story structure; there still exists a fundamental similarity: He left so he could come back one day to help those that needed it. So I’m going to put myself back together and hopefully help those that survived the worst moments in their lives. I figure, if he can do it, so can I.