Whether by my own choice or by the choice of others, I suppose I've always been a nerd. If I wasn't willfully isolating myself from other children through my clothing and my manner of sucking up to the teacher, I was told "you can't sit here" or "you're just too smart". Long before I was in my school's "gifted" programme, I walked in circles around the playground without speaking to other children; I invented a religion based on a series of children's fantasy books; I spent lunchtime and after school in teachers' classrooms because they would talk to me about books and history when kids my age wouldn't. Yes, I was a weird child.

In elementary and particularly in middle school, my nerdiness was a source of pity and derision. It took me some time, but by about seventh grade I found other kids who, to a certain degree, were like me. We were the "Retter kids" — students and honorary students of the teacher at my middle school most revered by us and most vilified by everyone else. We talked about her and her assignments at lunch, we went to her science-fiction club after school, we banded together against the non-nerdy world. I, of course, went a bit farther: I dressed like Mrs Retter, I read the books she gave me, I parroted her turns of phrase and I worshipped the ground she walked on.

Before long, the kids I ate lunch with grew out of the phase. They were no longer interested in arcane science fiction. I didn't, though. I had always been a nerd; I would always be a nerd. I was in tenth grade before I stopped attending meetings of Mrs Retter's club. I was a curiosity, a tourist attraction, "the smart girl who wears those weird clothes". I revelled in it. As far as I was concerned, in seventh grade, in eighth grade, in ninth, the ultimate nerdiness was being completely unlike everyone else, even if it meant being completely alone.

I am no longer the teacher's pet, antisocial weirdo that I was (though once a Retter kid, always a Retter kid). Yes, my school district calls me "gifted", I play quizbowl, I edit the odd publication, and some of my best friends are still adults. But now I dress less like a wannabe member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and more like a pretty average California kid. I listen to rock music and and try to play it; I spend weekends watching movies with my friends — things that would not have seemed possible when you looked at me four years ago.

But I am still a nerd. That part of me resonates more strongly in my being than any other. In a few changes of style and habit you cannot alter who you have been for nearly seventeen years. I have taken a word that once did make me cry and have turned it into a symbol of the self that I am now happy with. There is nothing shameful in knowledge or intellectualism and it does not preclude socializing and having a personality. It is a symbol of uniqueness, and therefore something to be proud of. It shows that one has not fallen foul to the vagaries of mainstream popular culture.

My friends, in addition to various people that I have met online, dislike the term "nerd". They prefer to be called "geeks" or sometimes just "smart people". But I prefer a straightforward term that tells the world who I am. I am a nerd; I love intellectual pursuits for their own sake and not because of the grade or because it will help me get into college. Other minority groups have reclaimed "n——r"¹ and "queer" and even "cripple". Why shouldn't we snatch back "nerd" from the hands and minds of those who called us names, who wouldn't choose us for teams in PE, who saved seats at lunch tables for their imaginary friends so that we couldn't sit there? Are we embarrassed — afraid, even — to stand up and declare our allegiances? Or, worse yet, is it that when those middle schoolers became high schoolers, when they stopped coming to science-fiction club meetings and only entered essay contests if it would help them get into college, they lost that part of their being which I treasure so desperately? Do I represent the dwindling population of an endangered species, slowly being killed off by MTV and McDonalds and 30-second sound bites?

Perhaps we are a dying breed. But then it is no less important — in fact, it becomes vitally so — that we enter our science fairs and essay contests; that we eat our packed lunches in an enclave in the corner of the quad; that we sit in the dark, alone in the glow of our computer screens, because no one will ask us to homecoming. But not only that: we should play for our teams and talk back to our teachers and laugh and sing and dance just like every high schooler who has come before us and every high schooler who will come after us. To be a nerd, above all, is to be a person.