“HA NERD!” yells the conventional part of me to the nerd, shoving her into the back confines of my personality that the outer world sees. 

“At least I am knowledgeable and do work that requires brainpower,” says the nerd part of me, shooting a sideways glance at the artist and enunciating each word with contempt. 

The artist slouches a little bit, sighs loudly into the blackness, and dips her brush in the palette in front of her, thinking yet another day in which my artistic abilities, skills, and efforts are devalued and invalidated. How inspiring. 

Although, I do not have dissociative personality disorder or struggle with a split personality, this inner struggle has been gnawing at my mind for a while. 

The cliché is between the nerds and the jocks. The jocks tease the nerds for their extensive understanding of various topics, or for their passions about certain subjects while the nerds grumble about the barbaric and crude nature of the jocks. We have witnessed and publicized only to this extent of the age-old battle, but we have ignored the shameless mirroring of this bullying reflected onto artists. 

Here is what I have observed: in a way to defend themselves, nerd will attack the artists so that they aren’t at the bottom of the food chain, but in putting the artists down, they acquire the same moral ground as the jocks. According to the nerds, artists are know-nothing-do-nothings. They splatter some paint; write a few unrhymed lines of poetry, try to create new genres of music, and act out plays with absurd names like Urinetown. And let’s be honest. Artists are all hippies aren’t they? They don’t care what we think. They don’t care when we insult their new way of writing or their abstract collages. They don’t take it to heart when we say that theater isn’t intensive, and they don’t mind when we take fine arts lightly. I mean, why should they? Artists probably aren’t even human, right? They probably don’t feel things. I mean, why else would they choose such visual and sensory mediums of self-expression? That just would have made it ironic. 

But research shows that artists are human. They are of the Homo sapien species. And they do feel things. Like sadness, and regret, and disappointment. And just as the nerds pursue careers in oceanography and nanotechnology out of their passions, artists try their luck in graphic design and directing for the same reason. They put everything they have into their work, they chase down their muses, they track down mentors, and they work, at times, more than theoretical physicists and statisticians, to remain off the streets and not be labeled as starving artists. 

And the problem boils down to our inherent insecurity. We try to defend our own passions and likes by discrediting others’ passions and likes and that really doesn’t take us anywhere. So the question is: how should the system change in order for those who feel a special connection to baseball, those who feel a special connection to science, and those who feel a special connection to drawing, all get along?

Lots of texture sets,
~Belle