Music Industry College in Fortitude Valley takes about thirty kids a year. In early 2025 I tried to be one of them. Or more accurately, I wrote down the reasons I should be one of them across a couple thousand words and several files and then never it.
It's still on my hard drive. Thirteen questions. The longest piece(s) of prose I'd written at that point in my life. Went through a fuck ton of iterations. Spent six months writing it only to never send it. Quoted Admiral Nelson at one point for some reason. Quoted The Saints. Quoted myself, basically, but the version of myself that thought a panel of strangers in a building I'd never been to was going to decide whether the rest of my life happened or not.
I told myself I didn't send it because of anxiety. Told myself my parents wouldn't have let me go anyway. Told myself the commute was too much. Told myself I'd already done what MIC would teach me. All of that was partly true. None of it was the real reason.
The real reason was I'd started to suspect that no school was going to save me, and I couldn't admit it yet, because if no school was going to save me then it meant I had to do the saving myself, and at that point I had no fucking clue how to do that.
So I closed the document and got straight A's and joined a friend group and got into a relationship and told myself those things would do the saving the school was supposed to do. February to April 2025 was the closest I've ever come to feeling normal.
The A's didn't save me. The friend group didn't save me. The relationship didn't save me. They all came apart over the second half of last year and into this one. I'm not going to go into the specifics, because the people involved deserve more dignity than being a character in a zine essay, and because some of them used to read this zine and one of them probably still does. What I'll say is this; when you use a thing as a substitute for actually doing your work, and then the thing falls apart, you're left with the work you were avoiding plus the wreckage of the substitute. Two problems where there used to be one.
After all that I doubled down on the scene. Thought, alright, if school's not it and the normie shit's not it, then this is. The underground saves. The underground takes in the misfits. The people who get cast out, the people that polite society treats as wreckage, the people who have to make their own community because none of the existing ones will have them.
And it has saved me, in real ways. I've been in bands. I've recorded music. I've made a magazine that people I respect actually respect. I've found a couple of mentors who give a shit. I'm not going to write the version of this piece that says it isn't real, because it is.
But the scene is a group of people and people do what people do. They form cliques. They repeat rumours. They protect their mates. They decide who's in and who's out. They let some pretty bad behaviour slide if it's coming from the right person. The underground that I thought was going to be different from school turns out to have its own version of the same problem school has. There are people you'd never trust if you actually heard the full story who get treated as if the story never happened. There are people who said one wrong thing on a Friday night who get carried as casualties for a year.
I quit the scene for six months before. I had a relationship, I had grades, I had standing. The thing causing me problems was the one thing I could cut. So I cut it.
The most honest thing I've heard about it came from my mentor, the singer of the band I'd put up against anyone in this city. He's been through more than I have, by a lot, and the people who've come for him are some of the same people who hand out free get out of jail cards elsewhere. What he told me was to keep doing what you're doing, and refuse to be a casualty. That's what makes it punk rock, in his telling. Refusing to be the thing the structure wants to make you. Refusing to disappear because the people who want you gone are louder than the people who want you here.
There's a line in Wonderwall. Maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me. I used to love that line. I still love the song. But the line is wrong. Or it's not wrong, it's a song lyric, which is a different thing from a masterplan. Nobody's gonna be the one that saves me. The most another person can do is just be there for you, and even that is a stretch sometimes.
The thing I couldn't see when I was writing those pages of pure purple prose is that every saviour I've reached for in the last eighteen months has been partly real and partly a story I was telling myself so I didn't have to do the harder thing. School. Friend group. Relationship. Scene. All real. All also stories. The harder thing is sitting with the work. The harder thing is writing the next issue without dressing it up as proof to anyone.
I hope, I think, I know.
From the archive. Essay · February 2026 · human counterpart to the AI-assisted BB14 polemic.