I just don't understand how you can not be concerned about your appearance. From time to time I'm vilified as the person who cares about the look of a teapot - and it's not that I believe my taste is superior , I just can not believe that other people don't care.
You were able to sing something they related to instantly, because it was part of what you felt. It was part of what you had already traveled through. It's part of the people you were associating with daily. It was all of that.
I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.