The Window Nobody Told Me Was There
There's a particular kind of silence that exists inside poverty that nobody talks about — not the silence of peace, but the silence over the horizon. No noise from over the fence. No signal from outside the block. Just the contained, pressurised hum of people moving through a life that was decided for them before they were old enough to make a choice.
I know that silence well…
I grew up between London and the West Midlands. Back and forth between my mother and my father. Two cities, two worlds, and neither one had much room for the kind of conversations I was storing quietly inside myself. When your area is run by gangs, when your school is a write-off, when the language you speak is so specific to the endz, that stepping outside of it marks you as a target — you learn to keep your interior life very… very… interior. You survive through the exterior. You match the tone of wherever you are. You assimilate. You move.
What nobody tells you about that process is how much it costs.
I was a roadman. Full blown. And I want to be honest — I wasn't even good at it. But I was doing the thing. Performing the identity because performing it was safer than not. And inside that performance, all these questions I had, all these observations I couldn't quite name — they were just sitting there. Unspoken. Unnamed. Waiting.
Then I got a hand-me-down iPhone.
My girl, well an ex now, had upgraded and passed it down — an iPhone 4, maybe a 4S, I genuinely can't remember — and I did what I always do. I went through every setting. Every corner. Every app I'd never heard of. Because that's the only way to actually know something. You have to go through it.
And somewhere in there, I found Apple Podcasts. And then I found TED Talks.
Now I want you to understand the context of that moment. This was not a middle-class boy discovering intellectualism. This was a young black British roadman from a bad postcode, sitting with a hand-me-down phone, hearing people talk about ideas with the same ease my bredrins talked about who had what motion on what concrete patch. Directors. CEOs. People who sat on boards whose names I had never heard spoken out loud in my entire life. People talking like the future was something you could design, not just fall into.
I chose not to watch. but I listened. an acquired skill it seems…
That was deliberate, even if I didn't fully understand it at the time. Watching lets you judge too quickly. The shoes, the haircut, whether they look like someone from your world or not — it all creates distance. But audio is intimate. Audio bypasses the surface and goes somewhere deeper. In that space I was able to absorb without performing a reaction. I just let it in.
What I felt wasn't inspiration in the way people sell inspiration — the poster-quote, the motivational speaker's crescendo. It was more like orientation. Like someone had handed me a compass in a room I'd been navigating blind. These people were giving me articulation to concepts I already knew but had never had the language to express. Flow state. Burnout. Creative identity. I'd felt all of it. I'd lived all of it. But without vocabulary, experience just stays experience. It doesn't become understanding.
The thing about the impoverished is that we don't actually have discussions — we rather have pissing competitions about who suffered more, whose endz were grittier — but we don't sit down (or stand up) and discuss ideas. And I think that is the deepest damage of it. Not the mould on the walls, or the shit state funded schools, or even the violence. It's the horizon. It's what happens to your imagination when every signal around you says that the frame is the picture. That this — right here, this postcode, this trajectory — is all there is.
A hand-me-down phone and a dead man's app told me otherwise.
I'm here now because of that moment. Not to inspire in the cheap sense. Just to crack the window open a little more — for whoever out there is pressing their face against it, wondering if anything else exists.
It does. I promise you that.
