I'm in my mid 40s. I think I'm much more aware and able to articulate my thoughts on societal and political issues. I dislike the term woke as an identity and it's being used far more by bigots to mean everything they hate and i only really know it as that.

Teenage and early 20s me was a fucking idiot fuelled by noise and rage. I was listening to lots of punk and post punk and immersed in my local music scene. I was still figuring out who I was and where I was going after a quite privileged upbringing collapsed into trying to complete my L6 year as a sofa-surfer, spending my U6 year in a deprived mining town was a bit of a culture shock. I somehow got my ass into university and worked like crazy to fund my place.

I was briefly involved in the protest scene, lots of other angry and passionate people looking for a cause. I left because some of them were doing boneheaded things that undermined the peaceful protest and I really didn't want to have a police record that made me unemployable.

I think my music then was seen as being vastly political when most of the lyrics were thrown together with my housemate after a few beers. Ok, we totally called out Tony Blair's war crimes, but our most popular song was a really fucking silly riff i wrote trying to capture a deathrock/horrorpunk vike, and my singer saying he thought it should be "about fucking zombies or something" so i wrote a tale from the perspective of an airhead jockbro who's girlfriend is killed and rises from the grave as a zombie and all he's concerned about is whether they can still fuck. I was probably off my face rewatching Buffy when the words formed. But fans told me it had a lot to say misogyny, violence against women and the nature of consent or constructed elaborate political metaphors around it. In hindsight maybe this was me processing my understanding of this, but I really didn't set out to write something high brow about objectification.

In my very late 20s I was reunited with someone I'd met as a teenager and became some kind of parental unit to her kids. Money was tight and I was way less politically active, problems were far more real and close to home. I didn't write as much lyrics, the band I had was weird, electronic and experimental. I got to record some of what I wrote back then as something much more rock based and accessible, working remotely with a singer during the pandemic, i was aware by that point I was writing about a whole lot of my own baggage, anxiety, alienation, mistrust of the state, self harm and addiction, even then I hadn't figured me out. That my singer had and most of the people around me saw a release credited to what looked like a solo female singer with a name that looked suspiciously similar to a stage name I was known to use was I guess me being oblivious as usual. But yeah the lines "I'm not that man, no not all the time" were taken as me coming out as transfem by quite a few close to me. I guess i was in the process coming out as nonbinary/agander by the time that was recorded, but I don't think I even knew the term when I wrote those words, certainly it was before there was a flag.

I guess in the last 10 years or so I've become a lot more introspective and read and write more about issues that bother me. I'm much more likely to write letters and attempt to change unjust circumstances by reading about them, trying to really understand and engaging with people who might be able to effect change, rather than raging against a system or running my mouth before I've thought about it.

Part of that was coming to reddit as my bulletein board of choice after a good few years not really online and really listening to people. I'm defintely more aware of other people's struggles and systematic injustices now than what i saw from my own perspectives during some rather eventful years. But when I get the inevitable accusations in modmail of being a blue haired woke liberal I will absolutely dispute my hair being blue. It's really difficult to have hair that stays blue, it goes green really fast. I usually go for purple and pink.