When you're 12 years old, the world feels like it's becoming bigger and bigger every day.
Sarcasm probably stops going over your head and you begin understanding metaphors, emotions and concepts of justice.
One preteen, Mahdi Souweid, says he can now finally express how he feels. His medium of choice? Poetry.
Already faced with the challenges of growing up, the young poet also struggled to cope with news coming out of Gaza last year. He wanted to find a way to be strong.
He listened to the adults around him discussing news and soon understood how Palestinian children were suffering. Having moved from Lebanon to Canberra at four years old, Mahdi appreciated his privileges and felt he needed to be a voice for these children.
He also thinks about his own past where members of his family were displaced or killed, and tries to lighten the heaviness.
Inspired by his older brother, and rappers Eminem and Lowkey, the 12-year-old has written 11 raps in the last month alone.
Mahdi's dream is "to become a famous rapper one day".
He first performs them for his brother. He then rehearses them in the car on the way to weekly Palestinian solidarity protests, and eventually performs for hundreds of demonstrators in Garema Place.
"If the protests wouldn't have happened, I would've started writing raps but not said them out loud," Mahdi says.
"The first one or two times, I was very nervous, but I when I see they like it so much ..."
People have begun stopping him in the street when he's walking to shops to ask, "are you the boy who raps at the protests?"
"We love it," they say to him.
Mahdi seems shy when you first meet him but you can see the courage and confidence building up in him once he's holding a mic and facing crowds of demonstrators.
"When I start writing I get a bit emotional ... because bombing is not only happening in Israel, but also in Lebanon," Mahdi says.
His first rap was titled Settler, Settler, Go Away.
"Settler, settler, go away, you are suffering from colonial syndrome," he wrote. "Olives, toys and stars so luminous, now I wake up to white phosphorous,
"Gleeful children reduced to rubble, I am looking for my infant's bubble"
Other children, as young as five years old, from various backgrounds have also begun to perform songs and poetry at these events after watching Mahdi.
"I am so proud of him," his mum, Nawal Souweid said.
Mahdi, too, has a strong example he can follow. One of his favourite rappers is Queanbeyan's biggest artistic export, Omar Musa.
Mahdi says his lyrics and "beat" resonate with him.
"I'm impressed to see someone like Mahdi speaking up fiercely about injustice, and the atrocities we see in Gaza, at such a young age," Mr Musa told The Canberra Times.
"Poetry can be a radical tool of resistance and bridge-building.
"It's hard to remember what I was writing when I was 12 - gory, horror stories and simple lyrical poems about my emotions, I think."
Mr Musa awakened his political consciousness by reading Malcolm X and listening to artists Public Enemy and Ice Cube, and only began rapping in his late teens.
"I started thinking more about racism, injustice and inequality, and looking at the country/world around me, and thinking about my place in it as a brown, Muslim boy," Mr Musa said.
Lucky for Mahdi, rap music is no longer an outlier when it comes to the Gen Z favourites.
Nostalgic millennials already lauded Canberra's first hip-hop and R&B festival - Juicy Fest - held earlier this month. As for those born in the 2000s bopping to newer artists, they know the future of hip-hop in Australia is only getting brighter.
