askchapo

Around my teenage years/young adult, but I had been very justice minded from a kid (audhd I suppose). I took part in politics in school, was very radlib and interested in all things political pretty much as soon as I could.

When the 90s neoliberalism hit my country, I was a young uni student, saw how people got treated when trying to get welfare and was in the same boat myself with poverty so I started collecting peoples stories and tried to push the stories into the public. This is when I hit my first real wall with a bougie newspaper that refused to publish my opinion piece and pulled back on a story I almost got them to publish. I did get the stories published in a local student magazine. I vaguely knew how all of this works before that, but getting involved in something made it really sink in.

This is also when I still was naive enough to think that human rights, basic rights and just decency means something in the country I live in. This is also a time when I started to really ask why people don't rise up even though they are treated horribly. I just could not understand it as a starry eyed uni student that people just took the shock therapy and internalized it as their own failure. I watched my family lose work and my dad ended up suicidal from the "personal failure" that was not at all on him (or anyone who lost everything then) and been radicalizing from there to whatever I am today.