Hello, I'm Sequoia Simone and I'm a nerdfighter. In the fall of 2009, I had
just started college. I was a freshmen in college. It was great because my dad lived two
blocks away from my university, so we didn't have to spend the money for me to
live on campus, which is great because that is extra expensive, but the flip
side of that was that all my friends that I went to high school with who also
went to the same college, they lived up in the residence halls and I did not.
I sort of found myself in a place where I wasn't connecting to the people I was
going to school with. I couldn't connect with my old high school friends, so I
went back to something that has always been very, very important to me...and
that's Harry Potter! Someone had sent me a link to A Very Potter Musical.
I finally got around to watching it and I thought, "Wow, this is the greatest thing
ever!" So I started going back through their old videos. I found a performance
that they had done at a Harry Potter convention and I was....transformed!! I went
out and got a job. I didn't have a job and I was like, "Yes! I have to go to
this thing so bad, that I'm going to go get a job so I can afford to go to
Florida." Once I had gotten my registration, and gotten my job, and I was
like ready and I knew I was going to go, I realized I needed roommates and I
realized that I had no friends that were going. I went onto the message boards
for the convention and there was one specifically for finding roommates. I
went on there and I was sort of looking around, trying to find people that I
thought would be compatible with me, and people kept writing DFTBA
or nerdfighter at the end their posts, which was very intriguing to me. It was
October or September of 2009 when I found the channel and there was 500
something videos by then. I went back and I watched every single one of them.
I felt very inspired by these people. I was in a weird transitionary point in my
life and there wasn't many people that I could talk to about it. And there wasn't
a lot of people who I thought would understand.
I was really afraid to put myself out there. I was 18 years old and I was still writing
Harry Potter fanfiction. I didn't know if that was going to be
acceptable to anyone. I started spending a lot of time on the nerdfighter forums
and because I was in such a transitionary place, and I wasn't feeling
like I had a lot of friends, I found a collab channel to join. Having that as my
introduction into the world of Nerdfighteria was amazing. At that point
in my life, Nerdfightera meant friends to me.
It meant being myself. Being enthusiastic. In a way that hasn't really changed, but in
another way it has changed. As I've gotten older, Nerdfighteria has become so
much more inspiring to me. I see nerdfighters and I see John and
Hank doing all of these wonderful things that are like contributing to society in
a way that no one else can and no one else does, and it inspires me to be that.
And to follow my dreams and to do all these like crazy things that I never
thought I could do. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore now, I'm just
sort of rambling, but the main point is that I found Nerdfighteria the same
way many, many, people did which is the Harry Potter fandom. And both of those
things are so important to me still. And I'm still learning things from them. And
I'm still growing because of the Harry Potter fandom and because of Nerdfighteria.
And I wouldn't exchange that for anything,