October 29, 2025 |
Before it went off, we had found a quiet rhythm. It was the beginning of summer, two years ago, and I was delivering a literacy workshop at a youth prison. I had two hours in a locked classroom to hold the attention of five teenagers with prompts to dissect rap lyrics, chair philosophical debates and spark reflective writing. After some tense, playful attempts to derail the start from the participants, they introduced themselves. After an hour, we’d curated a respectful atmosphere. But it was violently interrupted.
I have never heard such a piercing sound. The fire alarm had been set off in another part of the building, but for some reason the siren was coming from the corner of the room we were in. It wailed like a mother mourning her child. One of the boys tried to unscrew the device from the ceiling to no avail. Others covered their ears, yelled for it to stop, banged on the door. After a couple of minutes, an officer came to open it. The alarm ceased. There was relief, but any focus or patience was lost to the past. Before long, the boys were taken back to their cells.
I look back on that day not only as one that contained an alarm that disturbed the day’s flow – a symbol of the British youth justice system’s urgent struggle to educate the young people who go through its revolving doors. It was also a wake-up call to me, a threshold in my life. I remember exiting the prison, getting in my car, shutting the door and suppressing tears in silence. I pinched my arm to feel something and counted my breaths, trying to meditate my way out of a spiral.
Enough was enough.
I’d spent the best part of a decade working in settings like this – secondary schools, pupil referral units, youth clubs, community centres, prisons – and writing about it. My career had originally launched in this direction after my parents announced their divorce, my family unit in the Heathrow suburbs crumbled and I ran away to seek purpose in the inner city. Youth work granted me a new community. Journalism allowed me to raise awareness about the hidden injustices I saw on the frontline. I quit my full-time job at a youth-coaching charity in 2018 to go freelance and pursue my dream of becoming an author. For a while, I struggled to make ends meet, but I persevered and survived. My book, Cut Short, a story about preventing violence in South London, was published in 2021.
In an ideal world, all youth workers, and other people-facing public servants, like nurses, social workers and police officers, should receive clinical supervision, a space with a trained professional in which to offload, process and heal from the visceral demands of the job. But this is not an ideal world. In the business of serving others, self-care easily becomes the last priority.
I battled on without the necessary support in place. Young people I worked with were excluded from their schools, hospitalised or incarcerated. Bloody fights broke out in front of me, families I knew lost loved ones to knife violence and young rappers opened up to me in studio sessions about the trauma they’d experienced from life on the roads.
I kept writing as a way of making sense of these things, of purging my pent-up emotions and speaking truth to power. For a time, this worked as medicine for my mind. But in the end, it could only get me so far. After that day at the youth prison, it all got too much. The fire alarm jarred my nervous system. During my drive home, I couldn’t shake the desperate craving for something to drink or smoke. When I arrived, I collapsed on my bed and my head rang with deafening negativity. I’d crossed a threshold of no return. This time I knew I couldn’t write my way out of trouble.
therapy sessions helped when the author and youth worker Ciaran Thapar reached crisis point
I reluctantly prepared to part with a chunk of my modest savings to invest in six months of weekly therapy. I’d always believed in the benefit of doing this, but taking the leap had felt too costly, too daunting, so I found excuses not to. Now it felt too costly and daunting to put it off any longer.
I contacted a therapist who had been recommended to me by a close friend. During our introductory phone call, I explained that I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was edging towards a disaster. I’d never had much of a temper, but now my anger flared up multiple times a day. I’d always felt in control of my life, but now that control was slipping away. I was reassured that I’d reached out at just the right time. During what remained of the summer, I travelled up to Angel, North London, to attend sessions in a quiet, converted townhouse opposite a community park, where I would sit on a bench beforehand to prepare. Simply gaining the regular space to offload what I was thinking, experiencing and feeling with someone who could play a neutral, outsider’s role in the conversation quickly became life-changing.
So did being asked questions that empathetically but probingly encouraged me to reflect on the layered narratives I’d built up in my head – about family relationships, about my marriage, about the violence that orbited my work. So did being given permission to sit in silence, if only for a few moments, to let my busy mind settle into a state of peace. After every session I would walk around the local residential streets in a daze, then find a café or pub to grab a drink in and write in my diary. Opening up previously unexplored events from my childhood and adolescence proved exhausting, but clarifying. As I broke long-established ideas down, my progress got harder and I often felt worse, but then as I built them back up again, it got easier and I felt immeasurably better.
Six months passed. I carried on – how could I not? As autumn arrived, I made a breakthrough. I realised that I could no longer sustain being self-employed, financially or psychologically. I needed a full-time job again to get some professional structure and stable income back in my life. By coincidence, as if it were written by some higher power, that same week I received an email encouraging me to apply for a job. At first, imposter syndrome took over and I dismissed the idea. But my next therapy session allowed me to think it through, then give it a go. By Christmas I’d landed the role of director of public affairs and communications at the Youth Endowment Fund, which is a charity that funds, researches and promotes interventions for violence affecting young people. It was, as it remains, a chance to combine my youth facilitation experience with my passion for media storytelling and political advocacy to make change on a scale that I never could have imagined before.
Across 2024 I kept going with therapy. I reduced my sessions to fortnightly to keep them affordable and give me more space in between them, now that I’d rerouted my working life. I did some of them over Zoom. I tightened up my finances. I looked to buy a home. I became ready to start a family. Loved ones and friends commented on how much more present and at peace I seemed and opened up about their own therapy journeys or enquired about how they might start one. The biggest learning I’ve taken from this period is that we cannot expect to authentically and sustainably show up for other people if we do not show up for ourselves. A shelter that weathers the storm can only last if it is built upon a sturdy foundation.
There are still many things that I need to figure out. Problems turn up unannounced. Unrealised challenges inevitably lie ahead. But unlike before, I am ready for them now. I wrote this piece for two reasons. The first is to document my transformation. Sometimes it’s important to take stock, to glance into the rear-view mirror and acknowledge the road behind – its highs and lows, the steep climbs and downhill rushes – before cruising on.
The second is in the hope that my words reach someone else who might find it helpful to read them. Therapy only became normalised and accessible to me because I kept hearing men I could relate to explain their positive relationship with it. Their accounts created a rising tide of encouragement that lifted me up so I could be in reach of help when I needed it most, before I drowned.
Later this year, I will return to deliver my first prison literacy workshop since 2023. Feeling self-assured enough to enter with a calm confidence and leave with my mind and life intact – a better teacher, friend, son and husband, even if the alarm goes off – is a blessing.
Portrait by Jason Lloyd-Evans. Taken from 10 Men Issue 62 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
