OFF SCRIPT: The Blue Light Blur #14

Missing something that hurt you

When the absence of longing becomes its own surprise

Honestly, missing the role did not happen in the way I expected.

By the time I left, I had already been quietly dissociating from it for some time. That much will be obvious from the earlier posts. The separation had started long before the resignation was formal, and for that reason the absence of immediate longing caught me off guard.

I had expected more of an anchor.

After twenty-one years in an institution that had shaped so much of my identity, I assumed there would be a point where I would sit still, look at the life I had stepped into, and ask myself what I had done.

That moment never really came.

And that surprised me.

What I thought I would miss

There were times, of course, when I told stories from the job and the old version of me returned easily. The storyteller. The one who could take a harrowing incident and lace it with enough humour to keep the room engaged without letting the full weight of it settle. In those moments, there were occasional pauses. Fleeting ones. The sort that make you ask yourself whether what you are feeling is nostalgia, melancholy, or something else entirely.

But even then, I never found myself saying, with any conviction, that I missed it.

Perhaps part of that was circumstance. My new role still carried traces of the policing world. The mentality was not entirely alien. The pace, the judgement, the need for structure and calm under pressure all still existed, just translated into a different language. It meant I never went fully cold turkey. The shift was real, but the landing was not brutal.

That helped more than I realised at the time.

Remembering without romanticising

A few months after leaving, I pulled over to let an unmarked armed response vehicle pass.

It was one of the rare occasions I had even seen a police car since leaving. I expected something in me to react. Envy, perhaps. The old familiar pull of adrenaline. The instinctive sense of purpose that comes from knowing something high-stakes is unfolding and that you are part of it.

Instead, I simply moved the car aside and silently wished them luck.

Not because I wanted to be with them.

Because I knew exactly what they might be heading into, and I hoped it would end without anyone needing to use lethal force.

That felt important.

It told me that concern and identification could remain without longing.

The final chapters are not the whole book

When I did think about the past, I became aware of how easily the final eighteen months to two years could dominate the story if I let them. Politics, bureaucracy, dishonesty, frustration, difficult conversations brushed aside, support withheld when burnout was already visible and openly disclosed. Those memories were real and they mattered.

But they were not the whole career.

I made a conscious decision not to let the final chapters define the entire book.

For every meeting where my voice felt deliberately reduced, there was an incident where someone lived because we arrived in time. For every conversation where I was told to draw a line under something that needed confronting, there was a training day that went wrong in the funniest possible way and left us laughing for hours afterwards. For every moment where the culture felt small or self-protective, there was a room full of people who had your back when it counted.

That balance mattered.

Without it, reflection becomes distortion.

A new place for the same mind

I also think my transition gave my brain something crucial.

Movement.

For an overactive AuDHD mind, stillness can quickly become rumination. The fact that my new world gave me fresh problems to solve, new systems to understand, and different challenges to grow into meant the old adrenaline had somewhere else to go. My attention could stretch into new territory. I could channel energy into writing, filmmaking, and work that had slowly been squeezed to the margins by the imbalance of the job.

That did not erase the past.

It simply stopped it from becoming the only thing in view.

The reunion that confirmed it

When I met up with my old team about four months after leaving, I knew by the end of that gathering that I had made the right choice.

We laughed. Reminisced. Compared old and new worlds. For a while it felt familiar in all the right ways. Then the same stories surfaced. The same complaints about narcissism, toxicity and corruption. The same sense that nothing meaningful had changed.

I drove home with two emotions sitting side by side. Elated to have seen them. Deflated that the culture I had challenged was still very much alive.

Even so, one thing stayed with me more than anything else. They told me I looked happier, healthier, and younger than when they had last seen me.

That told its own story.

The echoes that remain

There are still moments, as there always are when something significant has passed, where part of me longs for one more blue light run. One more high-stakes decision. One more deployment where everything sharpens and the rest of the world falls away.

But I have learned to recognise those moments for what they are.

They are not signs that I made the wrong decision.

They are echoes of an old identity trying to remind me that it once mattered.

And it did.

It just does not get to define what comes next.

Looking back without living there

When I eventually sit down to write Fit to Carry, the working title for my policing memoir, I will allow myself to revisit that life properly. By then, I suspect I will do so more as a spectator than a participant. I will remember what was, smile at parts of it, feel the weight of others, and perhaps understand some things more clearly than I do now.

But that is for later.

For now, I know this much.

Lingering too long in the past breeds melancholy. I have avoided that partly because of the way my departure unfolded, but mostly because I made a deliberate decision to create distance. To mark the ending properly. To move forward without pretending the old life had never existed.

That, I think, is the difference.

You do not have to hate something in order to leave it behind.

Mirror moment

Sometimes the hardest thing to understand is that you can respect a chapter, feel gratitude for parts of it, and still know with complete certainty that it needed to end.

Missing something is not always a sign you should go back.

Sometimes it is simply proof that it mattered.