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Just remember, no matter how bad it gets, it's only a couple of years. Then real life begins and it's oodles better

Never was quite sure about the "Be yourself" bit of advice. Lots of folks are still figuring the ins and outs of things and I'd hate to tell somebody to be themselves if that meant acting like a socially slowed ****.

I guess as far as gaming goes, the vast majority of kids don't care one way or another about it when you're in school. Many of them will have heard of it (you're all the same target audience after all) and a startling number will have played. It's not the hobby that causes kids to catch flak, it's the introvertedness and lack of self-confidence that often go hand in hand with escapist hobbies that will cause you the most grief.

I guess as long as you take "Be yourself" to mean "Act like you own the place", you'll do ok. Self-confidence and a postive outlook are the two things that draw people to you the most. If you have those two things you'll have a relatively good time in high school. If you nerd herd up and circle the wagons every time somebody looks at you funny, you're in for a miserable couple of years.

I was introduced to gaming as a little kid by my dad - he'd been gaming since the 70s or so, and going to Historicon every year. He'd bring me back 54mm army men every year, until I actually went around 7 years old. I played with various sci-fi figures in a homebrew system from around 7th grade until my freshman year of highschool. I got some friends interested, and we picked up 40k around sophomore year. We started meeting up almost every weekend for a game, and went to Historicon as a group.

Nobody ever gave us any flak in high school because, really, when would it come up? If I'm not friends with somebody, I'm not going to say "Hi, I'm SRM and I paint little plastic spacemans" as an introduction. We usually got picked on for being the "artsy other kids". Most girls I've dated have thought it was a pretty cool hobby for me to partake in, and my girlfriend of the last year and a half is actually an enabler. We page through back issues of White Dwarf together, she occasionally gets me a nice model for Christmas and I sometimes paint one up for her.

Ramble ramble ramble. It's your hobby - it's not hard to get your friends into it, especially if you let them play Dawn of War or one of the similar gateway drugs to 40k and wargaming.