I don't talk about it much, but my childhood was not all that pleasant.  I was a very small person (hell, I'm STILL a very small person - 5'3" is below average height for women), and although I've got a fairly large personality to make up for it, I'm also the kind of person whom some people just seem to dislike on sight.  I've never understood it, but it probably has something to do with my decidedly above-average intellect and my conviction that I should not have to hide or downplay said intellect.  Translation: I was a brainy nerd who didn't have enough common sense to keep her trap shut about it.  Somehow, on the playground of my elementary school, this was the Unspeakable Sin, which warranted the Fate Worse Than Death.

Not only that, but I was virtually impossible to intimidate, and frequently refused to play by schoolyard rules.  The boys would chase me, and I did run, despite my height disadvantage, but when "captured", I refused to buy into the idea that underneath the slide was a jail cell I couldn't escape from - so I just walked out, leaving their jaws hanging at my refusal to play along (and why the hell should I have?  The only way I could POSSIBLY have won that game was to cheat, and we all knew it, so I refused to succumb to their childhood tyranny).

However, I was the perpetrator of a far, FAR worse crime in the annals of childhood insecurity: I was a Star Trek fan!  Quite how this came to be my Worst Sin of All is quite beyond me (although I still get a kick reading articles that speak of "millions of dedicated fans" and the show "changing the world" - it changed my world, all right, but the millions of fans clearly did NOT attend my elementary school!).  "Star Trek Freak" was the Worst Insult Imaginable to my classmates, even worse than "stupid", "worthless", and "useless" (all of which were leveled at me on a daily basis in school).

I understand a lot more now about why I was so reviled in school, and most of it was not at all my fault.  My social skills were woefully inadequate, and the result of other circumstances of my upbringing that I only began to understand when I left home for college.  The details are irrelevant - the main point was that the circumstances were not my fault and nothing I even remotely understood at the time.  All I knew is that I didn't have many friends, and most of my classmates hated me for some reason I didn't think I'd EVER understand.  It's probably self-evident at this point, but I'll say it anyway: I cried myself to sleep more nights than not while in elementary school (which is K-8 where I grew up, BTW).

In the midst of all this social misery, there was a bright light of hope, and that was Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I was in first grade when the show premiered, and I was on our eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C, in 1994 when "All Good Things" aired (something I have STILL not forgiven my parents for to this day - dammit, I should have been home for that - I missed it because of that stupid trip I didn't want to take in the first place).  So literally, this show encompassed my entire elementary school career, more or less.

My parents had both been fans of the original Star Trek (TOS, to the uninitiated), but it was a relaxed sort of fannishness - sure, my dad had all the TOS episodes on videotape, but my dad has a LOT of stuff on videotape; he's a big-time movie junkie.  My first memory of Star Trek was in a motel room somewhere (we were on vacation, but I'm not sure where we actually were anymore, and I doubt it matters all that much in the end) - Dad had ordered Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home on Pay-Per-View, and we had pizza, I'm almost certain of it.  I had no idea what to expect, but I liked movies, and the Pay-Per-View edition had a seascape at the beginning of it and the words "Save the Whales" shone on the screen for a long moment.  I've always been a fan of zoos and aquariums (Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo and Shedd Aquarium are still some of my favorite places to visit), and I was immediately interested.

Did I understand all of what I was seeing at the time?  Hell no.  But what I did understand was that these people cared so much about the whales that they traveled across the galaxy to find out why they'd stopped talking, and the crew of Jim's Bounty (yes, I know the name of the captured Klingon vessel, even though it's only shown once at the beginning of the movie) was smart enough and resourceful enough to figure out not only what needed to be done to save the world, but how to do it when it clearly seemed an impossible task (what do you do when the species needed to placate the aliens is extinct?!?  Why, you go back in time, of course, even though time travel has never been proven to be possible!).  Right there, I was hooked!  Here were REALLY smart people, and not only were they not ridiculed for their brains, they were APPRECIATED for them!  This blew my child's mind at the time, and still blows my mind when I think about how our society acts towards smart people.

Something else I noticed was that there were a LOT of different kinds of people in the Star Trek universe, and they all were APPRECIATED for their differences, not ridiculed for them.  There was Jim Kirk, of course, who spoke in Hack Cartoon Writer Dialogue sometimes (of course, at six, I thought this was how ALL heroes talked! - the long, overly dramatic pauses and the self-important tone of voice are standards in the cartoons of that time period, and I watched a lot of them, too), but he was from Iowa, not New York or even Chicago - if he could do it, then surely I could too!

Kirk's first officer was, of course, the cool Vulcan, Spock.  The two had almost NOTHING in common, but they were close friends anyway, and I really admired that.  Instead of bickering, they used their opposing points of view to make better decisions.

Not only that, but the bridge crew consisted of the United Nations (no, I did not really "get" that at six, but I knew I liked the mix of accents and skin colors); it showed me that EVERYONE has value, no matter where they come from, and that we can ALL work together towards a common goal - to someone who had long been picked on, this was the Holy Grail.

There's another thing I remember vividly about watching Star Trek IV that night - there was, mixed in with the usual string of previews, a preview for a NEW STAR TREK SERIES!!  It stuck in my mind even though I wasn't sure what I thought of the movie before I'd even seen it, and after the movie, I KNEW I HAD to see that show!  Even the preview was fascinating to me.  It's been over 20 years, but I can still hear the announcer's voice in my head, almost word for word, introducing the characters.

And what a cast of characters!  I wasn't sure about Captain Picard at first - he seemed kind of standoffish, and Commander Riker was a bit stiff as well.  The rest of the crew fasinated me, though - Lieutenant Commander Data was an android, with no emotions (how I wished to be an android during those long nights when I cried myself to sleep).  Lieutenant LaForge was blind, but with the help of technology, that disability didn't stop him from contributing as well.  Lieutenant Worf was a Klingon, the old enemy who is now our ally (my socially inept side longed for that as well - peace with my tormentors).

The female characters were just as cool, and there were several of them - even the chief of security was a woman!  I envied Lieutenant Yar a LOT - she was such a strong, powerful woman, even though I didn't think she was all that big or tall.  Despite the awful haircut (sorry to Denise Crosby if that was your real hair), she could be strong AND feminine at the same time - the original B3 Babe (B3 = BrainsBodyBoth)!

Counselor Troi was gorgeous, of course, and she was an EMPATH - how cool was THAT?!?  She could read people's emotions and tell what people were feeling - for someone who has always had a hard time putting her feelings into words, this was yet another Holy Grail - no explanations needed, and of course she would understand and give me the emotional support I so desperately needed but did not know how to ask for.

Doctor Crusher was beautiful too, and she had all kinds of high-tech medical gadgets at her disposal - hyposprays that delivered medicine painlessly (yup, I'm afraid of needles) and bioscanners that could tell instantly what was wrong with you without tedious questions I'm STILL never sure how to answer.

But the best part of all was Wesley Crusher - he was only about ten or so years older than I was, he was CUTE (yes, I was six, but I won't apologize for my taste - I STILL think he's cute, although now too young for me), and the best part was that he was SMART, like I was.  I STILL get pissed off when I overhear people bitch about how his character wasn't very well written - he was the character I related to the most of all of them.  Even now, I have a tough time finding the words to describe the connection I felt with this fictional character - I felt like he, more than anyone else I'd ever known, UNDERSTOOD ME and KNEW EXACTLY what I was going through.  Yes, his character was a nerdy kid - so was I.  He clearly felt more comfortable in the company of adults than with people his own age - just like I did.  And they LET HIM SERVE ON THE BRIDGE; they didn't force him to copy sentences and circle the nouns, just because that's what everyone else his age was doing.  I was always so bored in school, and here was a kid close to my age whose talent and intellect were RESPECTED, not turned aside (even the advanced classes were too easy for me, and I was too socially inept to skip grades).  He was my childhood hero, and I still have a lot of respect and affection for Gene Roddenberry for concieving of that character in that way - I felt like that character was ME, just in the opposite gender.

Needless to say, I watched every episode with rapt fascination, and watching the show became one of the few things our family could do together successfully.  My whole life centered around Star Trek: The Next Generation on Friday nights.  Not only that, but in my rich fantasy life (necessary for someone whose real life was the pits) I became a special member of the crew myself.  The walls of my childhood bedroom were full of invisible "computer panels", and I often had a long chat about my day with the Counselor Troi in my head.  The headshrinker my folks sent me to said (I found out just a few years ago) that I was out of touch with reality; I wanted to shout that if his reality had been much like mine, he would have stayed out of touch too!  My life on the imaginary Enterprise was so much better than boring, lonely, painful school and my equally boring home life, but I never forgot that it was all imaginary (I didn't much care, either - it was a defense mechanism and IT WORKED!).

A part of me died when Gene Roddenberry passed away (in 1991, I think - I'm too lazy to look it up just now, but I remember the brief memorium at the beginning of the episode Unification) because under its new leadership, the show became somehow less hopeful and more dark - since I was searching desperately for hope and trying to avoid the darkness, this didn't appeal to me as much as it had before.  I still watched, but I became slightly dissatisfied with what I was seeing, and the characters in my head remained more like their earlier counterparts.

I don't think I watched much of the last season.  My family was deeply involved in my parents' plans to relocate to Oklahoma - I was devastated by this, so much so that I gave up my beloved Star Trek for awhile just so I didn't have to watch with them (I've seen all the episodes now - I watched every single episode during the summer between high school and college), but I was still devastated by missing the last episode due to a trip to Washington D.C. that same week.  I hadn't wanted to go to D.C. with a bunch of people who hated me in the first place, and ended up being sick most of the trip.  Still, my two greatest regrets of that trip are missing the original airing of the last episode and seeing the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (both caused by our teachers' insistence on us going everywhere in pairs and my classmates' complete disinterest in doing anything I was remotely interested in).

I watched a few seasons of Deep Space Nine, and one season of Voyager, but our move to Oklahoma and my parents' canceling of our cable service (Grove, Oklahoma does NOT recieve free broadcast television) got in the way of my Star Trek habit.  I still had Next Gen episodes on VHS, and I watched those so much that I'm often surprised that the tapes didn't wear out during the long, lonely years of high school.  I loved Lieutenant Jadzia Dax, who I used to look like before I gained weight, and I admired Captain Kathryn Janeway (I love it when women get to be in charge!), but the new series didn't have the same hopeful tone as the Next Generation for me - the passing of the Great Bird of the Galaxy (Gene Roddenberry) had changed the tone of Star Trek too much for me.  The closest they've come in the last few years is Insurrection - I know it didn't do all that well at the box office, but I think that film really recaptured the sense of honor and justice that was the backbone of Star Trek for me - it's still my favorite of all the films.

I'm planning to go see the new flick when it comes out, but I'm not going to be obsessive about it - not this time.  I hated Nemesis with a passion (I won't get into how awful I thought it was at this time - I've written scads of words about it in other places), and since this new film is a return to the TOS world with new actors, I'm interested, but not holding my breath as to its aligning with the original vision.

I'm not sure I can really convey what Star Trek means to me, 20 years after the Next Generation premiered.  What I can say is this: Gene Roddenberry's vision of a peaceful future where all people can work together for the common good was so inspiring to me that it helped me keep moving on days when all I wanted to do was give up and throw in the towel - permanently.  My desire to see that future kept me going on days when my heart was so empty that I could barely move.  In plain English, that vision kept me from committing suicide many times (I was convinced that that future was just around the corner, and if I died, I wouldn't get to see it - it wasn't true, but I needed to believe it so much, and it served its purpose in keeping me getting up when all I wanted to do was give up).

Thanks to Twitter.com, I get to follow the actors who brought three of my childhood heroes to life - LeVar Burton (hero twice over - I loved Reading Rainbow too), Brent Spiner, and Wil Wheaton - and I get to see tiny glimpses of their lives now.  I want to dedicate this article to them - you may have thought you were playing characters on TV, but you did so much more for me by bringing those characters to life onscreen, and I owe you a debt I can never repay.  Thank you for letting me be Fan Girl sometimes on Twitter (but I'll try not to do it too much - I imagine it gets annoying).  Of course, the biggest debt I owe is to Gene Roddenberry for dreaming of the Star Trek universe in the first place; without him, my life would be so much different than it is now, and not in a good way (God, that sounds so minor for someone who saved my emotional life - my lack of skill with describing my emotions is why I only write for fun, not a living - I'd starve).  Thanks to him, I truly can have peace and a long life.