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Being assertive is when you exercise your right to self-expression despite what anyone thinks about it. Being aggressive is when you're trying to hurt someone. You can know the difference in your bones and it won't save you, because the people who want you to shut up don't care which one you're doing. If what you say threatens something they've welded to their identity, their taste, their status, their idea of how things should be, then you're aggressive. You're unprofessional. You're a problem. The distinction dies the moment someone decides you're an existential threat to their carefully arranged bullshit.

When 4ZZZ came on air, the first thing they did was acknowledge that some people weren't going to like what they broadcast. Then they said something that mattered: disagreeing with us does not entitle you to take us off air, because that is a threat to the right to freedom of expression. Radio Birdman knew this. The Saints knew this. You know this. Think about the last time someone came at you violently for what you said or did. Did it make you want to hear them out? Did it make you want to do what they told you?

No. It made you want to go harder.

That reaction has a name. It's called reactance. When someone tries to take your choice away, you don't fold. You double down. You express yourself even more forcefully. Maybe even aggressively. Because now it's not about the content anymore. It's about the right to say it at all.

Proving people wrong has been the engine of everything I do. The reason this magazine exists is because a history teacher told me I wasn't living up to my potential. That I wasn't giving back what I was given. That I didn't embody or capture that I understood not just what happened and when, but why it happened and what it meant.

So I started the zine. Not to prove him wrong out of spite. It was to prove him wrong by doing exactly what he said I couldn't. I wrote about the scene that gave me my meaning in life, and I didn't just write what happened and when. I wrote what it meant to me. I wrote why I thought it happened. A year later I had the same teacher for history. His perception of me had completely changed. Now I was the hard-working student who knew what he needed to do. He asked me what caused it. I told him I sat with what he said and did just that.

Then people started commenting on how I was complaining about things they thought they could one-up me on. Things they figured I had no right to complain about. So I wrote down what my life was actually like and shared it. That shut them up fast. But more than that, people came forward saying they'd been through the same exact shit. I'm grateful to call those people my friends and mentors to this day.

Then people called me 'unprofessional.' Great. I always wanted to change things up. I took it as a sign.

I learnt InDesign, Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator. I read Nietzsche, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Andrew Stafford. I went from kaput Procreate slides to a real workflow: inspiration, then Word, then photo editing, then graphics, then layout. The results spoke for themselves.

And then the criticism stopped. They had nothing left. The journalism was polished. Castrated of anything that could possibly offend anyone except people who are offended at themselves. Everything was on point, done the way people said they wanted, which was of course expressed in a way where I had to read between the lines to even understand what they were asking for.

Here's what nobody tells you: when you make it perfect, it dies.

Engagement tanked. You can write 'good.' You can make it look 'cool.' But does it have meaning? Does it have a reason to exist? Being agreeable and acquiescing to the absolute hell of other people's expectations has never done anyone any favours. Just look at every issue I made from late 2024 to early 2026. Sure, it quelled the rumour network from having anything to give me a headache about. But nobody gave two shits about what I wrote.

From March to September 2025, I didn't just quit the zine. I quit the scene.

There was no reason to go to gigs anymore, I thought. My reason had been to support my mates, the members of Piss Off, Shock Value, Heavy Liquid, but after they stopped holding regular all-ages gigs due to increased hall hire costs and low turnout, that reason evaporated. The only other reason I had was to 'gain connections' and 'make friends,' but I was going to gigs out of obligation, trying to extract something from them rather than being present for them. And the connections never came. I know now that was because my reasons were wrong, but at the time I couldn't see the cause, only the failure.

So I said fuck it. I started wandering around the city talking to strangers. And that's how I met my best friend, someone whose relationship with me I can only describe as complicated, codependent, and exactly what we both needed at the time. Let's just say I went out of my mind on the advice of a certain someone who said maybe if I did I'd be 'less of an asshole,' sure worked, and on the most insane day of my life I met her, and I realised I didn't need the scene, or music, or the zine, because being with her gave me everything I needed.

With my need for connection and expression met, the scene became irrelevant. If the zine and the gigs had worked, I wouldn't have had to try something else. And the something else worked. For a while.

In September, the life changes we'd each accumulated made it clear we were on different paths. She had her own shit to deal with. I had mine. It was a Sid and Nancy situation and I'm glad we both knew when to call it quits.

The first months after were a deep emptiness. Then it became a lingering background noise. A longing for the past. I had no other real choice, so I started the zine back up and tried to reenter the scene.

I felt like even more of an outsider. Now there were all these people I didn't know who somehow had a bigger name than me despite being new. I felt washed-up. Alienated. When I went to a gig, that was if I didn't talk myself out of it because it seemed like a waste of money to have a bad time, the only thoughts in my head were how people seemed to be staring at me and how even the people I used to know didn't seem to recognise me. I stumbled through a few comeback issues, each one taking more time for less satisfaction.

Then I said fuck it and posted a three-part polemic about the rise and fall of the scene. And for the first time in a long time, it worked. It was a revival of what I do, because for the first time in a long time I wasn't afraid to offend people to get what I wanted, which was change in my life, and attention, and social status. People reward you for provocation in the form of their attention. Putting out safe content has never done a single thing for me except create disappointment.

That polemic sent me down a path to do something I'd dreamed about since the day I went to my first gig. Hold a gig.

I practised my arse off. Learnt songs and solos I never thought I'd learn. Wrote new songs that came to me out of the pure emotion of realising those dreams were actually going to happen. I wrote piece after piece every day out of a manic drive that didn't ask permission.

The day of the gig, I looked in the mirror before I was going to perform and gave myself one of those looks. The kind you give yourself when you know it's going to be a look you remember. What I told myself was that starting that day, I was going to be clean, clean in terms of feeling right mentally, doing things that felt right, being the person I wanted to be. I thought about what a journey it had been to get to that point. I knew it was going to keep being a journey. I didn't know exactly what my life was going to look like yet. But I knew that from that day forward, doing things the way I used to just wouldn't feel right anymore. I could still do them. But being the person I used to be would feel wrong.

Thus began my descent into the maelstrom.

I was already anxious, bordering on a panic attack, which I did end up having. My cohost's logistical fuckups meant I was the one catching shit from the venue staff because I wasn't late to load-in like him. The staff had to stay beyond their set hours, had less time between sets, and they let me know about it with every passive-aggressive interaction. The mixing was shit. The sound wasn't right and I knew it. I swore, at my guitar, at my amp, at whatever I thought was fucking it up. The girl running the mixing desk, who from the start gave me a death stare and acted like she resented being there, took it personally.

Then my cohost's dad tried to kill me. I'm not being dramatic. He had his fists clenched. He told me he wanted to, and I quote, 'drive a nail up and down into my skull and rile it up and down until I die.' Then he chased me out of the basement of the venue. This from a man who swore more than I did. His justification was that I'd pissed off the staff and the audience at 'his event,' an event that was not his, that me and my co-host paid for and were under contract for, and whose audience was not pissed off at all.

I was seriously considering ending everything that night.

What stopped me was the people in the scene who came up to me afterward and told me, genuinely, that they could see I was giving it everything despite the circumstances. That the audience wasn't angry, they were into it. People DMed me saying they had a good time. People had gathered specifically to see me play and then left before my cohost's band went on. The show went on even after the venue owner wanted me out because my cohost's dad played the victim. By every measure that actually matters, it was a success.

I don't know if I'll ever fully make sense of that night. Some people say this, some people say that. But what I know is this: seeing the faces of people who mean something to me, seeing that they understood, wholeheartedly, completely, all the angst I carried against a life that kept trying to stop me from living the one I wanted, that is what it meant. That is the reason I create things.

People don't care about polished. People don't care about professional. People care about real. They care about someone standing up there bleeding for something they believe in, even when the sound is shit and someone's dad wants to cave your skull in. That's not aggression. That's assertion. That's the right to exist loudly in a world that keeps telling you to be quiet.

I don't write anything unless it has a purpose. I don't create anything unless it has a reason to exist. And the reason has never been to look cool or to be safe or to make sure nobody's feelings get hurt. The reason is the same one it's always been, to give back to the thing that gave me my meaning, and to say what I mean without asking permission first.

The process toward that isn't easy. It's not quick. It requires hard work and tears and moments where you question whether any of it is worth it. But I looked in that mirror and I told myself what I needed to hear, and then I walked into the worst and best night of my life, and I came out the other side knowing that being who I used to be would never feel right again.

I don't know exactly what my life is going to look like yet. But I know what it's not going to look like. And that's enough to keep going.