Masculinity and Comic Con

I  remember when this was supposed to be what a nerd looked like.  This is what Comic Con was supposed to be full of.  

But that's not what I found there.  Oh no.  I realized that any hope I had of clinging to my scraps of self-esteem was delusional.  Never has my masculinity been more threatened than it was at Comic Con. It went something like this:

 So then I'd be like...

and they'd be like... 

Man it sucked.  They took time to point out specific things I needed to work on, were full of encouragement, were generous with their time, and they were all unreasonably talented.  I'm very much none of those things.  I assumed that after Comic Con I'd want to go home and really hit the drawing board full of inspiration, but really all I wanted to do afterward was go home and work out.