By Zeina Ahmed Ismail
“You can be protected from the details, and still be shaped by the atmosphere”
On my floor there is a small, chaotic archive: ink sketches of hands in fists and hands reaching out, faces, lions and elephants, black‑and‑white photographs of streets and buildings, abstract patterns, bits of lace, blocks of colour, half-finished prints. Some of them were made in workshops, some alone at the end of long days, some are tiny photos I printed and then forgot about. None of them, on their own, explain very much. Together, they feel like evidence that I’ve been paying attention.
I did not grow up surrounded by people formally labelled as “displaced”, and I am not displaced [this may seem repetitive after reading my Blog 1 – bear with me]. My childhood was not one of checkpoints, asylum interviews, or uncertainty. For a long time, the realities of borders, migration, and mental health lived mostly at the edge of my awareness: in headlines, in passing comments, in the slight change in tone when the news came on. I moved through the world with a level of safety and mobility that many people are routinely denied.
For years, my own creativity lived at the margins of that awareness too. Drawing, taking photos, making things with my hands were always there, but rarely treated as important. I told myself they were extras, not “real work”. It was only in the past few years, as I began working more intentionally in arts, creative health, and migration spaces, and as I watched other artists tell their stories with precision and courage, that something shifted. I saw how art can both comfort and confront: how it can offer a sense of home, joy, care, rest, peace, and shelter, and at the same time quietly (or loudly) threaten and offend the right people; the ones invested in keeping certain stories invisible.
The scattered sketches and photographs at the top of this blog are not illustrations of other people’s trauma. They are my way of tracing the atmosphere I’ve been walking into: rooms where people arrive with complex histories, hostile paperwork, and very ordinary hopes; spaces where making something – a drawing of an animal, a print of a doorway, a song – becomes a way to breathe. As someone whose life has not been defined by forced displacement, but who now works alongside people who live with this placed definition – actively working to not be defined by a circumstance they did not create – I am constantly asking myself what my role is and how I can be better. How I can do better. How we can all truly do better.
This blog is not here to centre my observer-pain or privilege – that really isn’t the story I want to tell. This time around, this Blog is here to think about humanity, responsibility, and stewardship: what it means to carry fragments of other people’s stories forward without claiming them; to help build creative mental health spaces that honour lived experience without extracting it; and to keep learning, through practice, how art can hold both shelter and disruption at the same time. These are conversations that we’ve had over and over in rooms and spaces with incredible people, but unfortunately, those who need to hear it, either don’t get the invite, or don’t want to be there.
Second-generation struggle-dom and the question that breaks my brain
I did not grow up in a community where displacement was everyone’s daily reality, and I am very aware that my own life has not been marked by this in any way. What I did have, over time, were glimpses: friends, colleagues, and community members whose families carried histories of war, migration, and paperwork that could have gone another way. Their stories were never my entire environment, but they were close enough to unsettle my assumptions. They showed up in what went quiet when the news came on, in the tension behind a “simple” question, and in the way the word home could suddenly mean something entirely different depending on who was speaking.
And at the same time, I know I did not live those exact moments. I did not stand at that checkpoint. I did not cross that sea. I did not have to learn an entirely new language out of fear of persecution. I did not sit in that asylum interview, hear the door lock behind me, or wake up in that camp. I did not Facetime my family overseas and hear bombs in the background. I did not wake up in fear every morning worried I’d lost someone close to my heart.
So there is this double feeling. On one hand, I am close enough to be, even in a small way, emotionally distressed by the prevalence of someone else’s reality. On the other hand – I feel like a fraud whenever I speak about them. Like my worry is second-hand. Like I am borrowing pain.
And then there is the question:
“So when did you come here?”
It always makes me pause. Sometimes it’s just curiosity. This question turns my life into a pop quiz I didn’t revise for, and it does it in a way that makes everything feel like it needs to be tidy and explainable.
Sometimes it goes like this:
“So when did you come here?”
And I freeze, because the honest answer is not a single date. It is a whole messy timeline.
Then it becomes, “When did you come over from Egypt?”
“Oh, I’ve never lived there.”
“So what’s your nationality?”
“Well, Belgian and …”
“When did you get here from Belgium?”
And now my brain is doing that thing where it tries to explain my whole existence in under ten seconds while also sounding normal, and not making it weird, and not sounding defensive, and not sounding like I am auditioning for a role called “International Person”.
So I end up giving the full geography lesson:
“I was born in Belgium, lived there about six years, then Saudi for a couple, then Indonesia for over four, then Singapore for about five, then I came here [London] in 2018…”
And people usually respond, kindly, “Oh wow. You’ve travelled so much.”
And I smile, because I heard somewhere that that’s what people do. But inside, my overthinking wants to cry at the simplicity of the exchange. Because depending on who is asking, especially if the person in front of me has a life marked by different circumstances, and the kind of survival you do not put into casual conversation, I do not know what to do with my own story in response.
I can feel guilty answering a simple question. Guilty that my “wow, you travelled” is not their “wow, you survived.” Guilty that I am even shallow enough to compare such a thing in the first place.
It is not individualistic. It is the opposite. It is an ongoing awareness that life could have been arranged differently, and it’s uncomfortable to admit how much of so-called normal life is luck, faith [if you’re religious], paperwork, and timing.
Sometimes, when I write or speak about these lived experiences, I feel like I’m acting out “lived-experience plagiarism”. Like I am quoting lines from a book that’s not mine, but one I’ve been asked to summarise to the class. I know how common and relatable this feeling is.
A living-room memory and the hunger for real stories
This might be one of the core reasons why I’ve always been hungry for real stories – not headlines, not summaries, not “inspiring resilience” captions. Real ones.
I remember being younger and the room splitting in two. Adults talking in one corner, kids orbiting around the edges. Sometimes I would get up because I didn’t understand what was being said. Not in language, but in context. Other times, I stayed, not because I understood, but because I could feel the weight of it. Upbringing is strange like that. You can be protected from the details and still be shaped by the atmosphere.
Later in life, I’ve also witnessed the opposite dynamic. Friends making a careful effort not to talk about their family’s story, and me almost begging to hear it – because I want reality. I want the human texture we rarely make space for. I want to understand what people carry, without forcing them to perform it. That tension, wanting the truth but not wanting to extract it, is basically the heart of this work.
From origin story to everyday work
If Blog 1 was the origin story – family, migration, and all the threads that pulled me into this work – Blog 2 is about what it feels like to do this work now.
To sit with artists, practitioners, and participants whose lives are marked by borders and bureaucracy, while your own life has been shaped by these systems but not always directly cut by them. To “hold space” for stories that are not yours, while knowing that staying silent also has a cost.
This past year, my work at the intersection of creative health, migration, and facilitation has been one long lesson in that tension: how to care deeply about things you have not personally lived through, without pretending that you have.
To recap for anyone who skipped the last blog, I’ve been immersed in a short research with seven organisations, working with Maren Ellermann, Arts and Mental Health Producer at Counterpoints, contributing slightly to a non-clinical, arts-led mental health framework, and studying data from multi-city Holding Space gatherings, as well as completing my MASc research. I am also constantly in search of assets to add onto the London Arts and Health map [massive shout out to Amalia and Anna from London Arts and Health].
All of this clarified something simple and stubborn.
Creative Health spaces are not extras to mental health support. They are often the first doors people can walk through.
For some, they are the only doors. The doors we keep trying to open.
Here is the bit that irks me. Many of the people we most want to share space with, to hear from, to learn from, never make it to those doors.
Transport, childcare, fear of how the outputs will be used, worry of tokenism, paperwork, work shifts, language, health, money, sheer exhaustion, racism, and the way your postcode or immigration status quietly decides where you “belong.” All of these slam doors shut before we even send out the flyer.
And for those who do get in, their stories rarely travel far beyond that room. They might shift everybody present and rewire something in the collective. But in the bigger picture, the refugee and migrant narrative is still often told without the person being present.
If “we” speak about these experiences, are “we” stealing someone’s story?
If “we” don’t speak, who speaks instead?
What 18 facilitators taught me
For my dissertation, I spoke with 18 creative arts facilitators and artists working with people seeking sanctuary across the country. People running everything from drumming circles and clay workshops to theatre labs, food projects, and music sessions.
None of them described art or creative work as a replacement for therapy. They described it as a pathway to dignity, agency, and community. A way for people to shape narratives about displacement without being asked for their “trauma CV” at the door.
One facilitator told me about a participant who came every week to a music session and never said more than a few words. They would sit, listen, occasionally tap along, sometimes just close their eyes. After six months, they brought in a song from their childhood on a crackly YouTube link and asked if the group could learn it together. No backstory. Just, “Can we sing this?”
That moment felt huge, the facilitator said. Not because it would ever show up in a funding report, but because it was a tiny reclaiming of voice and memory. A way of saying, “This is part of me,” without having to narrate why.
Again and again, what people emphasised was not the flashy stuff, but the quiet relational labour that makes a space feel safe enough to enter and safe enough to return to. Trust-building. Pacing. Consent that can be changed later. Cultural attunement. Knowing when not to ask questions. Knowing how to welcome someone without shining an uncomfortable spotlight.
In one session, a facilitator offered a prompt like “draw home.” You could feel the room tense for a second, because we all know what everyone expects next. But a participant drew a dream car instead. Detailed wheels, a ridiculous sound system, the exact shade of paint. Then they spent twenty minutes describing it with pure joy. No explanation. No tragedy. Just delight. Agency.
An evening with Inspyre
Friday, June 19th, 2026, at an Inspyre event, I saw this in real time. The whole evening was built around story, not statistics, with performances, film, and conversation about home, migration, and belonging. But one small detail got me most.
On arrival we were given a postcard and asked to check in with ourselves three times across the night, writing our “address” creatively in response to different prompts about home. I started making jokes, of course, to avoid writing anything too sincere. Then my hand hesitated more than I expected.
Those around me in the room who’ve had to centre their lives around questions of home, leave everything behind [whatever everything might be for them], arrive, rebuild, and explain themselves, somehow knew how to answer those prompts with clarity and beauty. I didn’t, only because I have never been made to. And that can also lead to an interesting discussion with the person next to you.
It was such a simple exercise, and it quietly proved the point. Creative spaces can hold complexity without demanding disclosure, and they can reveal what we carry, what we avoid, and what we are still learning how to name.
Meanwhile, policy documents talk about “creative health” like it is a magic, low-cost intervention. High impact, low investment, just add glitter. But the very thing that makes these spaces work – time, trust, cultural competence, care for facilitators – is what rarely gets funded.
So at Counterpoints, our lovely, talented, excellent Mental Health Producer narrowed it down.
Joy, Imagination, Care, Choice, Rest
Maren landed on five pillars: Joy, Imagination, Care, Choice, and Rest. They sound nice on a slide, but for us they are not decorative. They are meant to be practical design principles for how a space is run.
Joy means we celebrate life, not just survival. Not just brave, resilient narratives, but the ridiculous jokes, the off-key singing, the moments where everyone laughs at nothing. Joy is not a side effect. It is a legitimate outcome.
Imagination invites futures beyond crisis. When someone imagines a softer future, or a different version of themselves, they are rehearsing possibilities in systems designed to do otherwise.
Care is relational. Hospitality, peer support, food that people can actually eat, checking how someone is getting home, boundaries and safeguarding done properly, not performatively.
Choice protects autonomy and prevents extraction. No one’s story is owed. You can speak, be silent, make something abstract, make something silly, leave and come back. Choice is how we resist turning people’s lives into content.
Rest honours energy, access needs, and anti-ableist practice. It looks like breaks, quiet rooms, ending on time, and not romanticising exhaustion.
Holding Space – what we learned when we listened
In Belfast, Bradford, and London, Maren convened practitioners, artists, health workers, and people with lived experience to ask: what helps? What hurts? What are we getting wrong?
What we heard, over and over, was that impact is relational and embodied. Not everything that counts can be counted. People asked for evaluation that notices mood shifts, confidence, connection, and collective learning, not just attendance. They spoke about sustainability; how stop-start funding breaks trust and how multi-year support, simpler reporting, and resources for transport, childcare, and facilitation are not luxuries but basics. They emphasised centring lived experience, not as a buzzword but as leadership and co-authorship. They wanted fewer long panels and more making, moving, eating together, so that the method matches the message. And they insisted that caring for facilitators is part of caring for participants, because emotional labour does not end when the workshop does.
Care for facilitators and the myth of being “neutral”
I feel overwhelmed a lot. Partly because the world is loud. Partly because I am constantly adjusting myself to systems that are not built for the way my brain works, something I have only recently had language for, especially around neurodivergence. Partly because care work is not something you can neatly switch off at 5pm.
I can come home and scroll the news in silence for an hour, sometimes more, with my coat still on. I can sit in the car and cry at something small – a colour in the sky, a shape of a cloud – and suddenly my mind is holding Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and about a hundred other griefs at the same time.
If I feel that, then what are we expecting from facilitators who are supporting others week after week, sometimes while carrying their own experiences of displacement, racism, and loss?
People sometimes talk like the problem is that facilitators care too much. But the problem is not care. The problem is asking people to build care-based spaces while funding them like they are disposable, and then acting surprised when burnout happens.
Something else facilitators raised with me is the pressure to be politically mute in order to be “fundable”; to avoid naming realities people are living through because it might make institutions uncomfortable.
I do not think that is realistic, or safe, in any capacity. Specifically not in work that is literally about welcome, safety, comfort, dignity, and humanity. Silence can be harmful. Asking care practitioners to be silent about the conditions harming the communities they serve does not make the work neutral. It makes it constrained. Do people who care not deserve to be cared for?
A Protocol of Care – instructions, but make them human
Out of all this, Maren finalised a short Protocol of Care: a practical guide to making creative spaces safer and more sustainable in arts and migration contexts. It is not a grand theory. It is a list of things people are already doing, pulled into one place so that others do not have to start from scratch each time.
Before a project begins, that might look like co-designing aims, checking access needs, planning for transport and childcare, briefing teams on boundaries and safeguarding, and setting clear and revisitable consent for photos and quotes.
During, it might look like a predictable welcome, naming the quiet space explicitly, offering a participation menu (do, watch, pause, leave and return), building in breaks, and providing food that people actually want to eat.
Afterwards, it might look like facilitator debriefs, gentle participant follow-ups, “you said, we did” feedback loops, consent-based documentation, and clear signposting to further support.
It is deliberately simple so it can actually be used.
The translation problem and why it makes me laugh-cry
Institutions love creative health until you describe it like a human.
A facilitator says, “People felt less alone.”
And someone replies, “Great. Do you have a validated scale for that?”
This is where the conversation can suddenly veer into alphabet soup. Not because measurement is bad. It isn’t. Evidence matters. But the way we are sometimes asked to “prove” wellbeing can feel like turning humans into spreadsheets and calling it care. You can almost hear the clipboards coming out.
Can you capture that moment where someone exhales because you told them, “You can just listen today,” using a PHQ‑9?
Can you quantify the feeling of belonging with a GAD‑7?
Should we hand out a DASS‑21 after the clay session, just to make sure the collaging did its job?
And if we really want to go full robot, shall we bring out the HADS and ask people to rate their anxiety while they are literally trying to breathe for the first time all week?
To be clear, I am not saying “no scales ever.” I am saying we need to be honest about what they can and cannot hold. If the only evidence that counts is the kind that fits neatly into clinical tools, we risk missing the actual point of these spaces: trust, relationship, dignity, choice. The slow work of people feeling safe enough to return.
And yes, I have also felt the grossness of editing someone’s quote down to a neat sentence for a report. The moment you realise you have sanded off the humanity to make it fit. That is part of why I am invested in stewardship, not just storytelling as output. [By the way, if you haven’t seen London Art and Health’s Creative Health Summer School Program, I really think you should, they address this all incredibly well.]
Maren speaks about how she’s doing this differently – building evaluation approaches that still give funders and partners what they need, without flattening people’s lives into data points. If you are interested in how creative health can be documented with care, not just counted, stay with us.
Why this matters and what comes next
Refugee Week reminded me that “courage” is not a posture. It is a practice.
It looks like someone walking into a room where they know no one. Trying clay for the first time. Admitting they are tired. Asking for fair pay. It looks like an organiser quietly booking taxis, printing bilingual signs, setting out a kettle, leaving space for silence.
Creative health is not a luxury in contexts of migration and displacement. It is a right, a necessity, and often the only available bridge to connection and dignity while people navigate hostile systems. Our task is to make that bridge as sturdy as we can: relational, culturally rooted, consent-led, and properly resourced.
Recently, another thread has been woven into this work. I’ve started a new role as a Programme Officer at Breathe Arts Health Research – an organisation that has been making the case for arts-in-health long before it was fashionable language. Breathe works with hospitals, communities, and cultural partners to design evidence-based programmes that sit inside everyday systems of care: from creative pulmonary rehab and stroke rehabilitation, to performance, participatory arts, and social prescribing.
For me, this feels less like a career “pivot” and more like a continuation. The questions that run through this blog – about stewardship, consent, creative health, and who gets to access supportive spaces – are now travelling with me into a context that sits closer to the NHS, clinical teams, and commissioners. I am not arriving as the expert who has it all figured out. I am arriving as someone who has been listening, learning, and making mistakes in arts and migration spaces, and who wants to see that learning shape the way we design, fund, and evaluate creative mental health work more broadly.
This does not mean stepping away from Counterpoints Arts, or from the people and projects that shaped this piece. I’ll still be working ad‑hoc with Counterpoints and with Maren, and I’ll keep contributing to the London Arts and Health map, projects, applications and presentations. The mapping work, the Holding Space learning, the Protocol of Care, and the Mental Health Framework – all remain part of how I understand my responsibilities in this field, whatever my job title happens to be. If anything, I hope this new role helps me build more bridges between community-rooted practice and institutional structures, so that the kind of work described here is not treated as an add‑on, but as core.
After I finished a draft of this blog, I sent it to a friend who has been thinking through many of these questions alongside me, even as our lives look quite different on paper. She replied something along the lines of, “So we’re co-miserating in public now, nice.” Then, importantly, “Will this make me famous?”
If you are planning an event, running a community session, or commissioning creative health work, take the pillars. Use the Protocol of Care when it lands. Adapt it, argue with it, improve it. Tell us what changes when you do. A learning strand only earns its name if we are willing to keep listening, changing, and trying again, together.
Before I sign off, I want to say a huge thank you to Maren Ellermann. A lot of what I have learned, shaped, questioned, and kept going with this past year has been possible because of Maren’s guidance, care, and commitment to doing mental health work properly in this space. I am genuinely so grateful, and I really look forward to continuing this work with her in new constellations. I also want to thank Dijana Rakovic for all the incredible people she’s introduced me to and for building and leading the Learning strand initiative at Counterpoints Arts, and for creating the space for this work to exist, grow, and be shared in the first place. I’d like to thank Tom Green and Almir Koldzic for agreeing to bring me into this incredible office family fold after I’d wiggled my way into that Annual Counterpoints Christmas gathering, 2024. I’d like to thank Lara Deffense, my fellow fake-Belgian, for being incredibly supportive from the beginning and allowing me to assist with producing the Refugee Week Trailer 2025, putting together the incredibly curated Film Programme, assist with content creation, and giving me space to research, converse with, and learn from many people across the country and beyond. Witnessing Ornella [@ornfilm], Laith [@laith_elzubaidi], Faz [follow Faz and Laith @food.i.cant.read], Gaby [@refugeworldwide, @_openmusiclab_,@sistermidnightfm], and Zafeerah’s work [@hurriyaarts, @paintbrushandco] has been a non-stop ride of amazement from my end. Truly I’ve never been around such a talented team, and if you know me, you’d know I couldn’t possibly say this with a smile on my face if I didn’t mean it.
Please stay tuned for our upcoming Arts and Mental Health newsletter, where Maren [follow Maren and Nzinga Mascall on @hopefulmessuk] will be sharing more about the brilliant projects, partnerships, and work happening across this strand, as well as what is coming next. I will also be sharing links there to the Protocol of Care, the Holding Space Learnings, and other resources as they are released, so if you want the practical bits, that is the place to find them.
And because it would feel wrong not to end with a small teaser: Counterpoints Arts and Rethink Mental Illness have an exciting announcement coming up, which Maren, will be sharing soon. It has been quietly cooking in the background, shaped by many of the questions in this blog – about creative health, justice, and how we build infrastructures of care that last. So stay tuned, keep reading our Learning Newsletter, and watch this space. We’re really looking forward to sharing what’s next.
Image credit: Fragments from workshops, walks and late nights: fists and reaching hands, animals, buildings and patterns. Not other people’s stories, but a small, unruly archive of how I’ve been learning to pay attention. Zeina Ahmed Ismail
