From police officer to producer: finding the thread that changed everything

For years, I genuinely believed my brain was full of random crap.

One minute I would have an idea for a book. Then a podcast. Then a keynote. Then a short film. Then a business. Occasionally, I would convince myself I should probably do something completely unrelated as well, because apparently six directions at once were not enough.

If you are neurodivergent, particularly if you are autistic, ADHD or both, you may recognise that feeling. Your mind fires quickly. Ideas overlap. Interests expand. New possibilities arrive before the last one has had time to settle. From the outside, it can look chaotic. From the inside, it can feel even worse.

For years, I assumed I lacked focus.

I know differently now.

The ideas were never the problem. I simply could not see the thread connecting them.

When movement is not the same as progress

Leaving policing after twenty-one years was not part of a carefully designed master plan. I had achieved things in that career that I will always be proud of, but by 2024 something fundamental had changed. My trust and confidence in the organisation had gone, and I found myself reacting rather than thinking clearly about what came next.

So I started applying for jobs.

A lot of jobs.

Anything that looked remotely possible became an option. I was shooting from the hip, driven by a mixture of defiance, frustration and desperation. I was not moving towards something with purpose. I was trying to escape something that no longer felt right.

That distinction matters.

When you are desperate to leave a situation, almost any alternative can look attractive. You can stay incredibly busy, produce endless applications, explore dozens of directions and still make very little genuine progress. Activity creates the illusion of movement, but movement without purpose is often just exhaustion wearing a smarter outfit.

By the time 2025 arrived, I was still caught in the same pattern. There were ideas everywhere, plenty of actions and very little clarity. Eventually, I stopped. Not because I had suddenly become enlightened, but because I realised I could not keep sprinting in six different directions and pretending it counted as progress.

I set aside time to think properly. I stopped asking which job I could get and started asking a much better question.

Who am I actually trying to become?

Once I answered that honestly, my approach changed. Instead of sending application after application, I submitted one focused application for a role that genuinely fitted the direction I wanted my life to take.

One application.

It worked.

A new job, a new direction and a new future appeared. Of course there was luck involved, because there always is, but luck only became useful once I finally knew where I was aiming.

The problem with having too many labels

If you look at what I do now, it is not difficult to understand why people might be confused.

I am an author, screenwriter, producer, production company owner, keynote speaker and mentor. I create fiction, write about neurodivergence, speak about masking and self-trust, develop films and build practical resources.

To a social media algorithm, that probably looks like a complete identity crisis.

To some people, it may look as though I am incapable of choosing a lane.

For a long time, I worried they might be right.

The truth is that I had chosen a lane. I just had not yet learned how to describe it.

I had been treating each branch of my work as something separate, when in reality they were all expressions of the same purpose. The books, films, talks, mentoring and resources were not competing identities. They were different ways of doing the same thing.

Finding that common thread changed everything.

Educate, empower and entertain

After plenty of false starts, useful conversations and support from people far more experienced than me, I finally found the three words that connected everything I was doing.

Educate. Empower. Entertain.

That is the core of what I do.

I am a neurodivergent person using lived experience, stories and practical work to educate, empower and entertain others.

Once I understood that, my work stopped feeling scattered. It became easier to decide what belonged, what did not and where each idea should go.

The 3E Framework is not a rigid business model. It is a filter.

If an opportunity allows me to educate, empower or entertain, it probably has a place. If it does none of those things, it is unlikely to deserve my time.

That does not mean I never get distracted. I am AuDHD, so let us not create unrealistic expectations here. What it gives me is not perfect focus, but direction.

It is not a prison.

It is a compass.

Educate

Education is about helping people understand themselves, other people and the environments around them more clearly.

That includes my keynotes, NeuroEdge, the Masking Starter Kit, workshops, webinars, podcasts and collaborative articles. It also includes film, particularly projects such as MASKS, because stories can sometimes explain something more powerfully than a presentation ever could.

Education does not have to mean standing in front of a room with a slide deck. It can happen through a scene, a conversation, a question or a piece of writing that makes someone recognise themselves for the first time.

Empower

Empowerment is about helping people rebuild trust in themselves.

It sits at the heart of my mentoring, speaking, social media work and NeuroEdge. It is also woven into my fiction and films, because much of my creative work is concerned with identity, transformation, belonging and the cost of becoming what other people expect.

For me, empowerment is not about empty encouragement or telling people they can achieve anything if they simply believe hard enough. It is about helping someone recognise what is already there, understand what has been holding them back and begin making decisions from self-trust rather than fear.

Entertain

Entertainment matters because people remember stories.

They remember characters, conflict, humour and emotion long after they forget a list of points on a screen. That is why I write The Raven series, the Borderline series and screenplays. It is why I make films. It is also why my keynotes are not designed to feel like lectures.

I can be funny.

I can also make things uncomfortable.

The best stories often do both.

Entertainment is not separate from the serious work. It is often the thing that allows the serious work to land.

Finding your own thread

The biggest mistake I made was believing I needed fewer ideas.

I did not.

I needed a clearer understanding of what those ideas were trying to achieve.

There is a useful exercise in that, particularly for anyone who feels scattered, restless or trapped between several possible identities.

Take ten minutes and write down everything you are drawn to. Include jobs, hobbies, projects, obsessions, ambitions and the ideas you keep returning to, even if they seem unrelated.

Then look beyond the activities themselves.

• Ask what outcome keeps appearing.

• Are you always trying to solve problems?

• Are you trying to protect people?

• Create beauty?

• Challenge systems?

• Build connection?

• Tell stories?

• Make complicated things easier to understand?

The common thread is often not found in what you do. It is found in why you keep doing it.

That is where direction begins.

Your life may not be random

A neurodivergent mind can feel like a room full of radios, all tuned to different stations and all playing at once. The temptation is to switch most of them off.

Sometimes that may help.

But sometimes the answer is not fewer signals. It is understanding what they have in common.

Your interests may not be random. Your career changes may not be proof that you are unreliable. Your ideas may not be evidence that you cannot focus.

You may simply be too close to see the pattern.

That was true for me.

Once I found the thread, I stopped seeing myself as someone trying to juggle several unrelated identities. I began to understand that I was building one body of work through different forms.

Books.

Films.

Keynotes.

Mentoring.

Resources.

Different outputs. Same purpose.

Turning chaos into direction

I left a career that had shaped much of my adult identity. I stepped into a new industry, built a production company, continued writing, developed speaking work and started bringing everything together under a clearer purpose.

None of that happened because I suddenly became a different person.

It happened because I finally understood the person I had always been.

The goal was never to become less chaotic, less creative or less neurodivergent. It was to stop treating those qualities as proof that I was incapable of direction.

That is also central to the work I now do with other people. I help neurodivergent professionals and creatives make sense of the noise, recognise the patterns running through their lives and rebuild trust in where they are going.

Sometimes the problem is not a lack of ambition.

It is too many ideas, too many possibilities and no clear way to see what connects them.

So start here.

Write down the three things you keep returning to, even when you try to ignore them.

They might be projects, interests, problems you always want to solve or ideas that refuse to leave you alone.

Then ask yourself:

What are they all trying to achieve?

Do not look for a job title.

Look for the outcome, the value or the change you keep trying to create.

That is where your thread may be hiding.

Finding it is difficult when your head is already crowded with masking, overwhelm, competing priorities and the pressure to keep functioning. That is one of the reasons I created the free NeuroEdge Starter Pack.

It contains practical tools to help neurodivergent people understand their energy, reduce overwhelm, organise competing demands and create enough space to think more clearly.

It will not hand you a perfect answer.

Nothing honest can.

But it may help you hear yourself more clearly beneath the noise.

Download the free NeuroEdge Starter Pack and start creating that space.

Download the free NeuroEdge Starter Pack

Then come back to the question:

What are the three things you keep returning to, and what are they all trying to achieve?

You may not need fewer ideas.

You may simply need to find the thread that turns them into a direction.