It all happened very fast. One moment I was in my parents house, and my mom's cancer was just a weird mole on her neck, the next moment I was living in an apartment in Baltimore trying to live out my young adult life until I got the news about mom. It all happened when I was just starting college and the fear of not having a place to go back to if things fell through was terrifying and then when my mom died I had no support structure. Feeling like an actual poor person for the first time led me to addiction (along with selling drugs to make money), and losing my mom reeled me back into reality.

As for the neonazis, nobody really thought about them! I knew about them from punk lore, but they were a 1980s phenomenon in my head until I saw them in real life. Chasing them away also gave me my first militant act of solidarity against a political enemy. We were literally doing antifascist action, and it felt great! This was Baltimore, these were our streets and they weren't welcome.

Realizing the regime change ops led me to read more about imperialism, and it wasn't for a while that I truly understood anti-imperialism. I began to realize that the neonazis, Bush's wars, the protests in Iran and Ukraine, Obama letting my family flounder while the banks got bailed out, even my past drug addiction; they were all connected. I had latent (though uninformed) sympathy for historical Communists, and it all started coming together for me in the past few years. The fact that I could draw a direct line from the war in Afghanistan to me snorting oxys off a stranger's car was freeing. I realized it's not my fault, and that I am just a little speck in a vast and disgusting system. And we need to crush that system, just like we crushed those neonazis trying to come into our punk shows.