You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

I overcame my social anxiety about people I don’t know turning their faces toward me and waved.

I’m not in the business of wearing makeup every day. Or going out of my house on a regular basis. I’m most comfortable behind a keyboard and . . . that’s it. Real life is awkward for me,

Being a leader was nerve-wracking, but with responsibility comes great admiration. So I was fine with it.

According to my mom, there was a pressing urgency for me to learn as much math as I could. An uncredited study she read once said, quote, “Girls become really stupid in science after they get their period, so you’d better learn as much as possible before that happens.” I had such anxiety about this “clearly proven” biological fact that I was studying calculus by the age of twelve. When I finally got my period, I cried, not because I was growing up, but because I had just learned derivatives and really enjoyed doing them. I was scared that estrogen would wipe the ability to do them from my brain.

here’s the part I unapologetically embrace: My weirdness turned into my greatest strength in life.

Growing up without being judged by other kids allowed me to be okay with liking things no one else liked.

during my childhood my fringe interests remained uncriticized, so they bloomed inside of me without self-consciousness until I was out in the world, partially formed, like a blind-baked pie shell. By then it was WAY too late. I was irrevocably weird.

Knowing yourself is life’s eternal homework.

In my childhood world, the sound of a modem dialing up to connect with another computer was the sound of freedom.

My dreams about finding a place to create true, meaningful friendships around my fake video game world had come true.

Your qualification for finding a place to belong is enthusiasm and passion, and I think that’s a beautiful thing.

life doesn’t follow traditional story arcs.

I freaked out inside, torn between fitting in with my peers and being a praise monkey teacher pleaser.

Moral of the story: Mortify yourself—when you are at your lowest, you feel ironically self-confident!

If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up.

We all have periods of our life where we’re trapped, doing something we hate, and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime.

The first book that made me think, I wanna get inside this character’s life like a pod person was Anne of Green Gables.

I started throwing in other characters from other books into my headspace, and pretty soon I’d built an imaginary town filled with stolen IP. Perry Mason was there (of course), the whole crew from the Trixie Belden children’s mystery series (Anne loved to steal Trixie’s boyfriend away), Lancelot and Guinevere owned the local garden store, even anthropomorphic pigs and spiders from Charlotte’s Web were full residents with voting rights. It got so complicated I had to start tracking my world in an accounting ledger with everyone’s names, addresses, and personality traits in neat little rows. (“Friendly!” “Secret lovers!” “Murderer!”) My town had it all!

I’ve always felt like a failure inside if I’m not already a success.

it’s a personal rule of mine never to order the same thing off the menu as someone else. You’re a flawed human being if you think two beet salads at a table is ever acceptable.

Find a group to support you, to encourage you, to guilt you into DOING. If you can’t find one, start one yourself. Random people enjoy having pancakes.

I met Patrick Stewart one time, and when he started directing words toward my head, I became so light-headed I almost fainted.

Once you tell people exactly what you will and won’t do, it’s amazing how they’ll adjust. Or they won’t. And then an opportunity or relationship goes away. And that’s okay.

We’re all a garbage dump of dysfunction, but if you get in there and churn the problems, they turn to mulch faster so new things can grow out of them.

I learned everything about creating and businessing the “stab me in the eye” way, but wow, did it feel good to take a moment to realize how much I’d grown over the past five years.

It might be extremely dorky to point out, but who you are is singular. It’s science. No one else in existence has your point of view or exact genome (identical twins and clones, look for inspiration elsewhere, please). That is why we need people to share and help us understand one another better.

I was raised incredibly weird, but one day I accidentally got brave

the next Oprah Winfrey or George Lucas will not come from a local news desk or college film program. He or she will come from the world of the web. Where the bar to entry is low, and where a group of kids can dream up a story and shoot it in their backyards. Regardless of whether someone gave them permission or not.

I hope all my copious oversharing encourages someone to stop, drop, and do something that’s always scared them. Create something they’ve always dreamt of. Connect with people they never thought they’d know. Because there’s no better time in history to do it.

if you are familiar with my acting work, you know that one of my best qualities is that I’m super-killable. No insult. I’m the Sean Bean of sci-fi women.

The thing that touched me in the most surprising way was the number of dads, uncles, and brothers who came up and said, “I’m getting this book for my daughter/niece/sister. I think this will help her keep up with the geeky stuff she loves but seems to be growing away from. I don’t want her to abandon who she is because she’s trying to fit in at school.” Guy after guy showed up and waited in line with my book, desperately trying to bring back something for an important girl in his life. If that doesn’t boost your faith in humanity, I don’t know what will.

People everywhere asked me again and again, “Why did you write a book?” And I always answered, “I wrote a book because when I would tell my story over the years, it would often make people laugh and, more important, sometimes it inspired them to try to create something despite any barriers or fears they might have had.”

if you send something creative out into the world, it can be received and affect people in different ways than you expected or intended. And that was the most beautiful thing I learned on tour: that the stories I wrote down were mashed up in other p...

I think the toughest part of this process is giving myself permission to become something new. Divorced of what anyone might want from me. I don’t know what that is right now, but I feel brave enough to embark on the journey to figure it out without having to live up to a reputation or be tossed around by opportunity.

I hope that every object, experience, or relationship that I add back into my life will be added because it’s something I love, not something I feel obligated to do out of expectation or ambition.