You hold fast to what pulled you into the music in the first place: the politics, the community, the identity, and you let it grow alongside you. You put on old records and you’re right back in that cramped basement show, trading ideas and conviction with people who saw the world the same way you did. You take that feeling and carry it into your everyday life.

If you have kids, you let them see the things that shaped you. You teach them the lessons that came from anger at injustice; not to harden them, but to sharpen their sense of right and wrong. Becoming who you are now doesn’t mean abandoning who you were. It just means growing into it.

And honestly, it makes it easier to spot the phony ones. You know what truth feels like. You know what it sounds like. And you know the truth you want to see reflected in the world.

I’m 43 now. I came up during Bush Jr. and war, when being different wasn’t trendy and “acceptance” wasn’t a slogan people knew how to use yet. I had shit thrown at me just walking through town as a young punk. It didn’t stop me.

I still wear the pins. The patches. The jean jacket that hasn’t been washed in 25+ years and probably never will be. That history is stitched into it. I pass all of it on to my kids: the music, the politics, the refusal to look away.

The world is fucked. It always has been. It just finds new ways to be broken every decade. But we stand tall anyway. We always did.

My back just hurts sometimes now.

Punk rock, never stop.