A year ago, I was just a normal, chilled out student, focused on my university grades and hoping for a lucrative career ahead. I considered myself as typical of my generation, idealistic, with peace-loving values that would never have let me contemplate using violence to achieve a political goal.

I’m only 21, but I’m now unfazed when dodging rubber bullets and choking on tear gas on the streets of Hong Kong. Instead of writing my overdue thesis, I’ve faced stun grenades and seen horrific injuries on the front lines of terrifying clashes with the police that will haunt me for years to come.

China calls us “thugs” and “rioters” and the police taunt us as “cockroaches,” so I want to tell my story of how a studious Masters undergraduate like me, who barely had the nerve to speak to strangers, is now bold and infuriated enough to engage in street battles with heavily armoured riot cops.

The past few weeks have been particularly traumatic and have taken their toll, after two university campuses where I’ve studied and used to laugh, carefree, with friends, have been turned into war zones, literally burning land.

My sleep is now broken by fragmented nightmares about the bloodied faces and gruesome wounds of young people fighting with the police at the gates of Chinese University in mid-November. Some could no longer see and had to be guided back from the front lines.