I say "I am a different person now," but perhaps even more notably: so are my parents.
I gave my mom the book "An Indigenous People's History of the United States" (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) for her birthday, & she thanked me, & sat there reading the information on the dust jacket & flipping through the pages, & seemed pleased & excited about it.
I am a different person now because of the information that became available to me when I reached adulthood.
The fucking decades of academic research & poignant accounts of lived experiences of oppression opened the entire world up to me.
I really do think I came of age at the peak moment where it all started bubbling over, where marginalized & oppressed people's voices finally punched through culturally in a way they never had before.