Ari Regan-Lacey

I'm Sitting in Silence for 20 Hours. Here's Why.

On the 28th of June, I'll arrive somewhere in Alexandria at 3:15 in the morning. I'll set up a small square, two metres by two metres, and I'll sit in it for twenty hours without my phone, without talking, without distraction. Just me, my thoughts, and the quiet that most of us spend our entire lives running from.

And honestly? I cannot wait.

There's a version of me that still lives somewhere in the back of my chest. He's about eleven years old, sitting at a lunch table, acutely aware that something about him is different. Not knowing what to call it, only knowing that whatever it is, it makes other kids cruel. Words got thrown at him before he even had a name for what they were describing. Before he understood what any of it meant. That kind of confusion, being punished for something you don't yet understand about yourself, it does something to a person. It teaches you that who you are is a problem to be solved, hidden, or apologised for.

School was a long lesson in self-erasure. The world around me was a mirror that never once reflected me back. Every love story, every advertisement, every offhand comment from adults who didn't know any better, all of it said the same thing, quietly and constantly: this is normal, and you are not it. I learned to perform. I learned to shrink. And by the time I finished school, I had become very, very good at both.

What followed was a depression that didn't announce itself dramatically. It just settled in. Heavy and grey and relentless, the kind that doesn't feel like drowning. It feels like standing in shallow water with no particular reason to move.

Then there were the horses.

I don't know how to explain what it's like to stand beside an animal that weighs half a tonne and feels everything you're carrying before you've said a word. Horses don't care about performance. They respond to your nervous system, not your story. You cannot be on edge, anxious, wound tight with self-loathing, and expect a horse to trust you. It simply doesn't work. So I had to learn, slowly, practically, in the dirt and the dust and the smell of straw and leather, how to regulate myself. How to be still. How to exist in a body I had spent years at war with.

Those animals gave me back something I didn't realise I'd lost. Purpose. Presence. A reason to show up somewhere calm.

They also gave me a career, which is its own kind of miracle.

I'm now finishing the first stage of my postgraduate psychology degree. I'm preparing to apply for honours research. And the area I keep being pulled toward, the one that feels less like a career choice and more like an inevitability, is LGBTQIA+ mental health.

Because here's what the research says, quietly and persistently, in paper after paper: LGBTQIA+ people are more than four times more likely to experience serious psychological distress than their heterosexual and cisgender peers. Rates of depression and anxiety are significantly elevated. Suicide attempt rates among LGBTQIA+ youth are between three and six times higher than those of their non-LGBTQIA+ counterparts. For trans and gender diverse people, those numbers are higher again.

These aren't abstract statistics to me. They have faces. They have the face of the kid I used to be.

I want to be honest about something. I am, right now, genuinely lucky. I'm in a relationship that feels like home, the real kind, where you can be completely yourself and be loved more for it, not less. I have found my people. I have built a community. And for the first time in my life, I actually like spending time with myself. Not tolerate. Not endure. Like.

That took years. It took horses and grief and therapy and the slow, painstaking work of learning that I was allowed to take up space exactly as I am.

Not everyone gets those years. Not everyone gets that support. Not everyone has the financial access to therapy, or the cultural permission to even name what they're going through. Some people are still sitting inside that suffocating silence with no one telling them it ever gets better, that they get better, more whole, more themselves.

That's who I'm thinking about when I sit in my two-metre square at 4am on a Sunday in June.

20Talk is a mental health charity building relatable, accessible resources for young people, particularly the ones that mainstream mental health support keeps missing. The money raised through this challenge funds education, outreach, and tools that reach people who might not ever walk into a therapist's office. People who need to hear that what they're experiencing has a name, and that they are not alone in it, and that it does not have to end the way they're afraid it might.

I'm doing this for my younger self, who needed someone to tell him exactly that.

I'm doing this because the version of me that learned to be still beside a horse deserves to sit in twenty hours of silence without falling apart, and maybe even find something in it.

I'm doing this because I know what it costs to survive yourself. And I know what it means when someone builds something that makes that a little less expensive.

If you'd like to donate and support the work of 20Talk, the link is below. Even a small amount reaches further than you might think.

And if you're in the middle of it right now, the confusion, the hiding, the grey relentless weight of it, I want you to know: the quiet you're terrified of is the same quiet I'm choosing to sit in. There is something on the other side of it. I promise.

20 Hours of Silence for Youth Mental Health.

I’m taking on the 20 Hours for 20Talk Challenge which will see me sitting in a 2×2 metre square in a warehouse, alongside 400 other participants, with no talking and no technology for 20 hours. All I’ll have are the essentials I bring with me: a chair, sleeping mat, journal, water, and food. No distractions.