IT was Bob Dylan’s lyrics that made me vote Yes. Ever since my student days I’d voted Labour. But in 2010, I did so for the last time and with no great conviction. It was difficult to know what Labour stood for any more. But what the SNP were offering seemed too radical a step. An independent Scotland? Breaking up the UK. Pretty bold, is it not?

Things were grim after that election, with the Tory/LibDem collusion – sorry, coalition; the Labour Party flailing under Ed Miliband; the horrors of austerity; the rise of the food bank; and the most dispossessed in our society being blamed for all of its ills.

It all felt increasingly hopeless and I was slowly losing interest in politics. But in 2014, I was pulled back in. The referendum was looming and I didn’t know how to vote.

Then one day I was listening to a Dylan album when these words hit me, “You can hang back or fight your best on the front line.” As a writer, I know the power of the right words at the right time and I knew with absolute certainty that I would vote Yes. Yes, it was bold, and radical, but it was a chance for real change. Hanging back was not an option. Doing nothing was not an option.

I spent the next few months writing for a TV show in Italy so I wasn’t around for the build-up to the vote. When I got back to Scotland in early September, I was blown away by the buzz around me. Everywhere you went people were talking about it. It seemed everyone I knew in the creative industry was out supporting Yes. My best pal Libby McArthur was all over the radio, writers Sergio Casci and Peter Arnott in print. My good friend Chris Dolan had written a one-man play for David Hayman about a lifelong Labour/TUC man’s journey to Yes which I saw on the eve of the referendum.

The atmosphere was electrifying. David said after the show that it was the best night in the theatre he’d ever had. It felt like we couldn’t lose.

And yet we did.

Talking to the domestic staff at my uni, mostly women, mostly over 50, I found out they had all voted No. They had been frightened for their pensions. It made me realise that talking to people, finding out about their fears after the event wasn’t that much use.

I hadn’t been anywhere near the front line. The movement for an independent Scotland, the establishment of our own Parliament, the referendum itself – these were won by decades of commitment and vision and sheer hard graft that had nothing to do with me.

So I joined the SNP and have been actively involved since. I’ve met amazing people, from lifelong stalwarts to people who have joined since the referendum. All of them, fighting their hardest on the frontline. I’ll never again not know how to vote.

Ann Marie Di Mambro, joint Political Education Officer for Kelvin branch of SNP, writer and professor at Glasgow Caledonian University