When I was a teen, I had a palpable shyness visible to anyone who looked my way, or so I thought, which only served to make me shyer. I was busy retreating father into myself every year. When I finally made it to high school, I was practically mute. I wouldn’t talk to anyone unless they talked to me first.

My first year of high school, somehow, I made two friends despite myself. They showed me the light and introduced me to punk. It was love at first listen. I was smitten. Of course, I said! How stupid of me not to see it before. If I don’t want to talk to people, it’s best not to have them want to talk to me!

I transformed myself into the scariest version of me that I could create. I wore second-hand combat boots, my dad’s old flannels, jeans rolled at the cuff and eventually, I got myself a leather motorcycle jacket on which I hand painted a skull with a mohawk that was the logo for the band The Exploited. I shaved most of my hair off and dyed the rest of it blue. I put safety pins in my ears. I built a wall around my shyness.

It worked, too. Most regular people stayed far away from me, but the ones like myself were drawn to me. We were part of an unspoken network based solely on our external walls. These people were just like me. They were misfits, castoffs and misanthropes. They weren’t all shy, but most of them had some sort of social issue or tragic past that prevented them from interacting normally under most circumstances. We all dealt with it by puffing up like peacocks. These were my people. I finally felt at home.

In addition to adoring the jagged edges of the music, the unpolished, rawness of it all, I also fell in love with the culture. I was overcome by the freedom of letting it all go; getting into a mosh pit and bumping into people without a care in the world. It helped me figure out who I really was. The external wall helped bolster my internal shyness until, eventually, I could talk to people of my own free will.

I’m still that little punk girl at heart. I still don’t enjoy looking normal. Fortunately, in the field of graphic design, I don’t have to. People expect a certain eccentricity from those in a creative field otherwise they’re not creative enough. “Oh, she’s an artist,” they say and go about their business. Now, the combat boots and the blue hair are not a necessity, but a choice. I don’t need them as a wall to protect my delicate innards. I wear my mohawk on the inside.