Day 1 – How did you come across the subculture?

Oldest photo I could find, aged 15 when I first discovered purple lipstick (but couldn't really apply it to well)

I don't want to sound like one of those "I WAS RAISED KAWAII DESU!!!" types, but my mam is a goth, I say is because even though she doesn't wear the clothes very often these days, she still enjoys the music, ooohs and ahhhs over the things I wear and sighs over the sad demise of Wayne Hussey's good looks.

My mother didn't force me into gothdom, she raised me to be whoever I wanted to be, and for a good few years in my pre-teens I was all about shocking pink, Barbie and The Spice Girls, I regarded anything recorded before 1990 as "old people music" (to the point of me complaining loudly when VH1 had an Adam and the Ants day...Oh how things change!).

When I was 11 I moved to secondary school, and due to a poor choice on my behalf (I wanted to go to the same school as my friends rather than applying to get into a better school and having to make new friends), I ended up in one of the worst schools in the area, I was bullied to the point that someone tried to strangle me with my school tie because they decided I was weird.
The teachers did very little about it so my mother took me out of school and I was home educated up until college.

I spent a lot of time alone from then, my old friends either didn't want anything to do with me any more or didn't have time, there was a point in my life when I really did have no friends at all, and then when I did finally start socialising with people I had become so nervous around people that they all found me strange (at least I assumed they did), and the only people that didn't seem to raise their eyebrows at me were the "goth kids".
Well that was what everybody called them anyway, they listened to Marilyn Manson, Linkin Park and AFI, they wore hoodies, trip pants and shittastic eyeliner and they carried skateboards despite most of them not actually being able to skate.

At this point I suppose I became the clichéd angsty teen.
I listened to metal and got annoyed if people called me a goth, I wasn't a goth, I was just a bit alt and wore a lot of black.
Around this time I suddenly had regular internet and started hanging out at a place in Newcastle called "The Green" (litrally a patch of grass in the middle of town in front of a goth shop called Kathmandu), and I started meeting people who I supposed were "real goths" and thanks to the internet I found Gothic Lolita, and when youtube came along I started looking up the bands that people mentioned when I went to The Green and then I started to open up to the music my mam listened to.

So I suppose although I'd always been surrounded by my mam's gothness, I didn't really "go goth" so to speak until I was around 15.