This blog post was originally written as part of a series for The Welders. It was posted to their blog on July 25, 2017.
I am 28 years old. I graduated from high school ten years ago, graduated from undergraduate six years ago, and graduated from graduate school four years ago. When I was 11 back in 2000, I had a love for all things anime and Japanese. It was the thing to be into for me and my group of friends. We weren’t the most popular kids in school. No, we were the kids who were spending our weekends at the mall buying model Gundams, figuring out how to convince our parents to make us Sailor Scout costumes, finding new music genres in J-Pop and J-Rock, and reading and writing fan fiction on the internet back when you had to label things “lemon” to indicate explicit content.




