thinking gallery

Some people know exactly where they're going. They have the plan, the destination, the five-year vision already framed and hanging on the wall. They move through the world like they're following directions to somewhere they've already been.

I have never been one of those people.

As a child I was going to be an entomologist. Insects made complete sense -- tiny, intricate, endlessly various, each one a small system of extraordinary complexity. Then birds caught my attention and I was going to be an ornithologist instead, which felt like a natural progression because birds are just insects that got more ambitious. Then genetics, because if you're going to understand living things you might as well go all the way down to the code. Each passion was total and genuine and then, without drama, something else would open up and I'd follow it there instead.

By the time I was seriously considering what to study, I had landed on Musical Theatre. And in retrospect this makes complete sense. Theatre contains everything. You could spend a career in it studying human behaviour, movement, language, psychology, the precise mechanics of how one person makes another person feel something. You could be a scientist of the human animal and also, crucially, do it while singing and executing flawlessly tight choreography. It was, in its own way, the most interdisciplinary option on the table.

And then, at the last moment, I didn't. Not because something went wrong. Not because I lost my nerve. Just because another door was open and it looked interesting and I walked through it. That's how most of the best things in my life have started.

The door said Multimedia. First year the degree had ever been offered, which meant nobody had quite figured out what it was yet -- including, I suspect, the people teaching it. I sat in lectures that felt like someone else's conversation. Politely interesting. Not mine. So I moved to something that felt more substantive, and found myself in Computer Science, and found myself in trouble.

The lecturer spoke a language I couldn't quite reach. Fine, I thought -- I'll teach myself. I reached for the textbook. The textbook had been written by the same lecturer. It was called Java Gently. Reader, it was not gentle. I have feelings about that book that I won't be fully unpacking in this particular section of the website.

I moved again.

What I found, eventually, was the intersection I'd been looking for without knowing I was looking for it: people, psychology, and information theory. How information moves. How meaning is made and lost and remade in the space between one mind and another. How the same data can reach one person as revelation and another as noise, depending on a hundred variables that have nothing to do with the data itself. This was Information Science, and it was, finally, mine.

Languages had always been a first love -- the way they carry culture and assumption and history inside their structure, the way switching between them changes not just what you can say but what you can think. English came in alongside Information Science not as a second choice but as the natural companion: if one discipline was about how information moves, the other was about the medium it moves through, and neither made complete sense without the other.

I graduated into the middle of the .com boom, which was either perfect timing or terrible timing depending on which month you picked. Dimension Data recruited me -- a technical company that should, by any conventional reckoning, have wanted engineers. They saw something in a humanities graduate that I wasn't entirely sure I could see in myself yet, and they invested in it. They gave me a technical vocabulary I hadn't had: object-oriented thinking, systems modelling, the formal language of how complex things are structured and how they talk to each other.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, bent over an entity relationship diagram for the first time, something happened that I can only describe as recognition.

An ERD is a map of relationships. What exists, what properties it carries, how it connects to everything else in the system, what it needs and what needs it in return. Looking at one felt like being handed a notation for something I'd been thinking in all my life without knowing it had a name. My brain, it turned out, had always worked this way -- as a vast network of nodes and connections, constantly updating, every new piece of information immediately evaluated for how it changes the relationships already there. I notice missing connections the way other people notice typos. Not a skill I cultivated. Just what I am.

Dimension Data placed me at Woolworths within six months. I was building middleware -- infrastructure that allowed systems speaking completely different languages to exchange data with each other. Mainframes, Unix boxes, Windows machines, each with its own logic and its own unspoken assumptions about what communication was supposed to look like. I was, without anyone using the word, a translator. Not of language -- of the structures underneath language. The formats and protocols and assumptions that determine whether information moves, or gets stuck, or arrives in a form that's technically correct and completely useless to the person on the other end.

I stayed. Woolworths made me permanent. I kept building bridges.

A business analysis diploma followed some years later. Top of class, which surprised nobody who'd watched me take a complex system apart on a whiteboard with what I can only describe as visible pleasure. The diploma gave me the formal toolkit: decomposition, stakeholder management, the ability to hold a room full of people with completely different mental models and help them find the shared one. But the most valuable thing it gave me was something rarely formally taught, the ability to be genuinely useful to a board in the morning and a development team in the afternoon, not by changing who I am in each room, but by understanding that different people need the same truth framed differently to receive it at all.

I found out, much later, that a significant amount of how I work has a name. The ADHD diagnosis came first -- a framework that explained certain things about attention and energy and the way I've always found it easier to go deep than to go through the motions. I've never been formally screened for autism, but AuDHD -- the place where ADHD and autism overlap -- is where things finally cohered for me. Not as a verdict. As a key. The graph brain that had always been mapping edges and flagging the missing ones. The truth-orientation that makes performance feel impossible and authenticity feel non-negotiable. The navigation system I built from necessity long before I understood why I needed one. All of it, suddenly, legible.

The Musical Theatre ambition didn't go anywhere, by the way. It went underground, the way water does when the surface route is blocked -- and it's been finding its way back up ever since, in various forms, in various places. Some things don't leave. They just wait.

the life

Play

Here's the thing about play: children don't need to be taught it. It's their default state, the mode their brains return to given half a chance. It's how they learn, how they process, how they make sense of the world. The research is unambiguous -- play is the gateway to flow, the brain state where attention is effortless and learning happens without feeling like learning at all.

And then somewhere along the way, we tell them to grow up. And most of them do.

My secret side mission in life is getting adults to play. Not gamification -- although full disclosure, gamification works beautifully on me and I have absolutely no shame about this. Not structured activities with a debrief. Actual play -- unstructured, purposeless, sometimes slightly ridiculous, with no outcome attached other than the playing itself.

The tricky part is that adults have forgotten how. Without rules, without a goal, without someone telling them what winning looks like, a lot of grown people just stand there feeling awkward. Which means sometimes the nudge they need is permission. Sometimes it's a dare. Sometimes it's just someone else going first and refusing to be embarrassed about it. I have made a study of this. I am frequently the someone else.

Animals

There are two Oriental cats and two house rabbits, and they would like you to know that the furniture situation has been resolved and they were here first.

Orientals are not decorative animals. They have opinions, and they express them, at volume, at hours of their choosing. They are intensely present in a way that is either delightful or exhausting depending on your mood, and they are constitutionally incapable of leaving you alone when you are trying to concentrate. I find this, on balance, a feature.

House rabbits are one of the great misunderstood pets. People imagine something passive and peripheral, something that lives in a hutch and requires occasional acknowledgement. This is not a house rabbit. A house rabbit is a small, stubborn, surprisingly affectionate creature with a rich interior life, a clear sense of routine, and very strong views about what time breakfast should be. They also binky, which is what it's called when a rabbit, overcome with joy, launches itself into the air and twists. If you have never witnessed a binky, I am sorry for you.

Living with all four of them is, among other things, a daily reminder that being entirely, unapologetically yourself is both possible and effective.

Making things

I would eat colour if I could. Not watercolours specifically -- the pigment. The pure saturated fact of it. Cadmium yellow, phthalo teal, quinacridone magenta. There is something about colour that bypasses language and goes straight somewhere else, and I have never fully understood it or wanted to.

Watercolour is the medium that found me, and part of why it works is that you cannot completely control it. You can set up conditions, make choices, bring intention -- and then the water does what water does, which is frequently something more interesting than what you planned. Fighting it never ends well. Working with what arrives is where the painting actually happens.

The colours on this site came from one of my paintings. That felt right.

Making things -- in any form, with any material -- is what I've come to understand as active rest. Not passive recovery, not switching off, but a different kind of on: hands busy, mind loose, the particular quality of attention that lets problems unknot themselves in the background while something is being built in the foreground. I need this the way I need sleep. It's not optional.

Moving

My aunt is a ballet teacher. I grew up in ballet, modern, jazz -- movement as a language before it was ever a lesson. It's stayed with me in various forms ever since, and I call my weekly conscious dance session church, which is only partly a joke. It's where I go to be entirely in a body rather than entirely in a head, and the difference is significant.

I dance at any occasion that will have me. Weddings, festivals, kitchens. The music doesn't have to be good. The floor doesn't have to be right. The company doesn't have to be willing, though it helps.

The body knows things the mind hasn't articulated yet. Movement is how you find out what they are. I came to understand this early and have been finding ways to keep it true ever since.

The outdoors

Cape Town has mountains on one side and ocean on the other and wilderness close enough to reach on a weekday afternoon if you leave by three, and I have never taken this for granted, not once, in all the years I've lived here.

Being outside is not optional for me. Not a reward for finishing work, not something that gets scheduled when everything else is done, but a requirement, like sleep, like water, for continuing to function well. There's a particular quality of thinking that only happens when I'm moving through landscape. Longer. Slower. Less urgent. More honest. The kind of thinking where you find out what you actually believe rather than what you've been telling yourself you believe.

The mountains specifically. Something about scale. Something about the reminder that most of what feels urgent, isn't.

thinking

Thinking

Some things are worth writing down properly. Not as posts or updates, as pieces. Things I've thought about enough to want to say carefully.

Topics include neurodivergence and what I've learned about my own brain, play and why adults need more of it, the non-linear career and what it's actually like to navigate without a plan, and life in general.

read my thinking →
gallery

Gallery

Watercolours, things made, events produced. A collection rather than a portfolio.

see the gallery →