I had the pleasure of doing a short talk at Friday Night Lights at The Foundry in North Acton, a community hub part of our little world in Park Royal.

Karim Hadaya from Munchie Lunchie Productions & HFEH MIND bring the night to the space every month, an amazing evening with a mix of talks, poetry, music and art.

Photos by Nandit Desai – @theobscurawizard

This is my short talk – 8 min read.

Graffiti and the Reasons We Paint

Graffiti is an amazing thing to find as a kid. I was five the first time I clocked a piece properly – it was just off the Edgware Road near the canal. A guy in a jeep with wild lettering either side – it stuck in my head ever since. Decades later, I found out it had been painted as a tribute to a DJ who died in a crash. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something. From then on, I started trying to read the streets.

I grew up in Kilburn, on one of many council estates hidden behind the High Road. It was the 80s and 90s, single-parent household, and a childhood full of contradiction – a great community for sure, and luckily an amazing Mum but also, outside a daily dose of chaos. You had coach trips to the seaside and rare community centre parties, but you also had a lot of pain – poverty, trauma, violence, drugs. The kids – all of us – grew up fast. Dirty knees and slanted patches of grass for football, games like tag and knock-down ginger with half the estate. It felt like a school without teachers. But as we got older, things shifted. You start to see what the grown-ups are carrying, and the estate becomes something else. Respect and survival take over.

By the time I was 12, life had started to get hectic and I started to experience some of the horrors of being poor and the confusion that comes with growing up unaware of what life’s really like for people with no real sign of how to survive. Graffiti came in at just the right time. It gave me something – a code, a challenge, an identity outside of what I was dealing with at home and on the estate. It was a place to put all that energy and pain without hurting anyone else. And more than anything, it gave me a mask. I wasn’t David anymore. I was Das. The alias came first. Painting came first. Real life became background noise.

I wrote illegal graffiti from 1995 to 2015. I still get up now and then, but for different reasons. Back then, I thought I was just chasing the buzz – the danger, the adventure, the respect – but in hindsight, I was trying to heal. Graffiti became my therapy, long before I understood what therapy was.

In 2014, I sat with a therapist for the first time. I’d reached a point where my behaviour, how I felt about myself, the way I was moving – it was all spilling into my relationships. I needed help. It was in those sessions I started to see it clearly – graffiti had been my medicine. Alongside a good dose of cannabis, it had kept my pain at bay. It gave me the feelings I needed – control, purpose, pride – in a world that hadn’t offered me much of that growing up.

This isn’t everyone’s story, and I wouldn’t say all graffiti writers are walking trauma stories. But I’ve spoken to enough writers to know I’m not alone. I still live and breathe this culture. I opened the UK’s first graffiti gallery back in 2003 in Brighton, and since 2011 I’ve run RareKind, where I work with a team of artists – all graffiti writers, many still active. My closest friends are writers. We’ve grown together in it.

I also created the F24 Podcast – 70 interviews and counting with artists, mostly from graffiti backgrounds. We talk about growing up, finding culture, and what led them into creativity. What’s interesting is that sometimes, even when they’re not aware of it, there’s often a thread of trauma woven into their story. A loss, an upheaval, a hurt that writing helped hold.

I find it amazing – so, so interesting – because it mirrors what I learnt about myself. Graffiti helped me survive.

To the outside world, graffiti can look like vandalism – messy, loud, confrontational. But step closer and you’ll find something else entirely: a deeply human form of self-expression. It’s a way to speak when other routes are blocked. For many of us, especially young men, graffiti isn’t just about making marks on walls – it’s about saying: I exist. I’ve got something to say.

This isn’t a cognitive thing, – I’ve got something to say – but graffiti gives great purpose to a human’s life, especially when life or their surrounding haven’t been so fruitful.

I had a real hard time growing up, not much inspiration around me although my Mum was and she was amazing at letting me know the power of my mind and conviction of thought to get through anything life throws at us, but not everyone is that lucky. I had my son Josh when I was 20, I didn’t have a dad growing up and to be honest there wasn’t many on the estate to look at and understand what that roll provides in a child’s life but I’d been writing graffit for 5yrs by the time J was born and I’d painted tubes, run the streets with tags and pieces, painted tracksides and also escaped police by shimmying my way across the outside of a bridge, 30ft over tracks. I reflected on this when Josh was born, I wasn’t built to be a dad, I wasn’t taught what to do for a child but my bravery, fearlessness in some very dangerous activities helped me understand that if I can do all that, I can be a dad. Josh is 25 in a couple months and my god what a journey its been and graffiti {and my mum} as the school that taught me what I was capable of and we have built an amazing relationship growing up together.

I’ve been a lucky one, I made it through and made a life for myself and have been a present Dad in my sons’ life.

There are thousands of writers in our city today and the ages of writers goes from 13 to our oldest active on the streets are about 60. The tubes, especially the Centrals and the Bakerloo’s, are battered with tags currently, two of the most prominent writers seen on the insides are over 50yrs old. These are my friends and I know a bit of what is going on in their lives and the reason writing graffiti is what is keeping them going, a purpose.

The process itself is healing. There’s focus in it, a meditative quality. Choosing colours, building letterforms, executing a pieces or tags under pressure – it demands presence. For a few minutes or hours, nothing else matters. That’s powerful, especially when your mind is loud or heavy.

Graffiti also builds community. Crews, collectives, friendships that span decades. You look out for each other. You learn together. You build respect. And in that, there’s belonging – something every human needs.

Weve lost quite a few writers to suicide, their feelings were so immense that they took their lives, in the last 6yrs the London graffiti scene alone has lost 8 men to suicide and that number could be higher if you count the mistakes, the lifestyle, one line of coke and pills to many, an escape route from a train yard or trackside but the electricity from the lines or passing trains have taken their lives, falling from a bridge. That’s the cost of putting real life in the background and being your alter-ego, as I mentioned earlier, when your mind is heavy finding an outlet other than talking can be a really dangerous endeavour but as humans we need to feel alive and ideally on top of something. When things are going wrong, a different direction, a dream fading, a relationship breaking, too few chances for opportunity in life, you know as a writer that if you ‘get up’ meaning plaster your name about the city you are achieving something but like any mask, it’s thin like the material used to make it, it can cause a distraction to the truth but cannot cover forever, its breaks down, you need to open up, you need to address who you are in order to get through what we all face as humans, you need to feel, you need to talk.

If we want to support men’s mental health, we need to rethink what that support can look like. Sometimes it’s not a conversation in a quiet room – sometimes it’s a spray can, a wall, and the courage to create.

We should be encouraging men to find positive, creative ways to express themselves – whether through graffiti, music, writing, or whatever makes sense to them. We need spaces that are open, non-judgemental, and rooted in understanding. Places where we can drop the mask and be honest about what we’ve been through. Because emotional honesty isn’t weakness – it’s strength, it inspires, and you achieve. This emotional openness must be looked at in a very positive light, as the preferable go-to when things are hard. Talk, trust your community, break the silence, we’re all going through it in some way. Men and Women. If someone doesn’t feel safe enough or have the opportunity to talk about their feelings things can get really dark really fast, be the light, open up, speak, share pain, let go, inspire and build.

To the ones who’ve felt unseen or unheard: your feelings matter. You matter. Whether it’s a piece on a wall, a line in a notebook, or a chat with a mate – expression is healing.

Let’s support each other in breaking the silence. Let’s recognise graffiti, in all its raw defiance, as a kind of medicine. Being a creative is more than making colours work, putting a track together, making something, it helps. A reminder that art can save lives – it certainly helped save mine.

Thank you.