What is/was Nerdy Artists?

You might see a reference to Nerdy Artists somewhere across my online presence. It used to be my website domain, and it still lives on through my creative Instagram account @nerdyartistsprints, but what does it actually mean?

During my (nightmarish) first year of college, I decided to connect with other students who were creative but weren’t studying within the college of art. My goal was to avoid losing touch with my creative side throughout my college years. Marketing was not on my radar at all whatsoever at this point, so I didn’t know that I would be able to use creativity in my career. There were a handful of creators all writing and sharing content as a single entity, but as that year got worse, the venture was largely abandoned.

I never wanted to give up that name or space, so I kept it and Nerdy Artists was always my baby. It became my entity across social media (despite it being plural lol) and for the time between my first year of college and figuring out what I really wanted to do at community college, it stayed that way. It also stayed largely untouched and underutilized. I would post a video every once in a while on YouTube, post photos on Instagram pretty sparingly, but it was very quiet for a long time.

In 2022, not long before making this big change to SquareSpace 7.1 and deciding to use it as a fresh start for my space, I decided to go by my actual name. This was terrifying to me for some reason but I had learned in a marketing class that having a space online that was yours (beyond LinkedIn) was important. I didn’t want there to be any confusion about my space, so I decided to use my name as my domain.

I know that a name change being scary can seem silly, but it was really important to me to not lose it entirely. It remains my art Instagram handle as I mentioned above, and I nod to it with my username on Twitch, JustCallMeNerdy. It is where I started which happens to be my lowest point in life thus far. You might think that erasing that point would be my first priority but that couldn’t be farther from true for me. People in my offline life don’t call me that, but it’s become my nickname in a lot of the communities that I am a part of online so I knew I couldn’t fully say goodbye to it.

It would be like removing a chapter from my story. That chapter might have been awful, it’s a chapter that I’m still working on accepting and not feeling embarrassed by, but it’s an incredibly important chapter about who I am and why I am the woman that I am today. I feel this immense pressure (self-inflicted) to be perfect, I think a lot of people do, but I’d rather be happy than perfect any day and I was extremely unhappy when I was suppressing that part of my life entirely.

Do I tell people every detail of that year when they ask me about my journey? Absolutely not, especially considering I’ve mentally blocked out much of that year so I don’t entirely remember everything. I usually say something like “I had a really hard time my freshman year, left school for a bit, and my mom saw my potential before I did and encouraged me to take classes at community college.” It was truly an awful part of my life, and I plan to write about it soon.

But it’s not a part of my life that I keep completely under wraps anymore.

I would consider myself successful in this moment. I am currently working as an HR Communications Co-op at Comcast Business and I love my job and my team. I am very sad that I have to leave them to finish school but I know I have to finish what I started, especially considering how far I’ve come. I am gearing up for job searching and depending on where my home base ends up being, I am preparing to buy my first property. I have put myself out into the world socially which is truly saying something as the shyest person on the face of the earth. Most importantly, I am so much happier than I have ever been.

All of that is true because of my low point. I never would’ve realized how lost and unsure I was about what I wanted to do with my life. I never would have left school. My mom never would have driven into the city one random day to get me onto campus to take one class and that professor never would have told me that she dropped out of school just like I did and she found her way back. I never would have taken an introduction to business class after seeing more of what my mom and brother-in-law do in marketing. I never would have declared my major the very next term and graduated in 18 months with a scholarship to Drexel for the grades that I worked so hard to get. I never would have made it here without that low.

And that is my extremely long-winded way of explaining why Nerdy Artists will always be a part of my personal brand haha! Your past defines you because your past is able to tell you how much you’ve grown. I’m still learning to fully accept mine, and I encourage you to look back and do the same.