Job titles have never really explained the work I do, and I stopped trying to force them to. Across industries, sectors, and contexts, I make complex things make sense and solve the puzzles hiding inside them.
Pick a thread. Follow it. See where it goes.
Early obsessions
As a child I was going to be an entomologist. Insects fascinated me endlessly: tiny, intricate, and endlessly varied, each one a small system of extraordinary complexity. Then it was birds, and I was going to be an ornithologist instead, which felt like a natural progression because birds are just insects that got more ambitious. Somewhere in there it was genetics, because if you are going to understand living things you might as well go all the way down to the code, with a brief foray into chemistry. Each passion was immersive and complete, but before I knew it something else would emerge, and my interests would lead me onward.
The almost-theatre life
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 Java Gently detour
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.
Finding the right discipline
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.
The ERD recognition moment
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.
The translation layer
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.
The BA toolkit
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.
Late language
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.
What came back
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.
Elsewhere
The things that refill the tank and make the work possible.
Play
My secret side mission is getting adults to play more.
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Animals
Two Oriental cats, two rabbits, and constant reminders to be yourself.
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Making things
Making is active rest: hands busy, mind loose, energy restored.
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Moving
Movement gets me back into my body and helps me find out what I know.
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The outdoors
Outdoors time is non-negotiable. It gives me perspective and resets me.
Children do not need to be taught play. It is their default state. It is how they learn, process, and make sense of the world. In play, attention is easier and learning happens without feeling like learning.
Then somewhere along the way, we tell them to grow up. Most of them do.
My secret side mission in life is getting adults to play more. Not gamification, although full disclosure, gamification works beautifully on me and I have no shame about that. Not structured activities with a debrief. Actual play. Unstructured, purposeless, sometimes ridiculous, with no outcome attached beyond the play itself.
The tricky part is that adults have forgotten how. Without rules, without a goal, and without someone telling them what winning looks like, a lot of grown people just stand there feeling awkward. Sometimes the nudge they need is permission. Sometimes it is a dare. Sometimes it is just someone else going first and refusing to be embarrassed. I have made a study of this. I am frequently that 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. That 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 breakfast time.
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 needed to fully explain it.
Making works for me because you cannot fully control it. You can set up conditions, make choices, bring intention, and then the material does what it does, often something more interesting than what you planned. Fighting that never ends well. Working with what arrives is where the interesting part starts.
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
I grew up in ballet, modern, and jazz, movement as a language before it was ever a lesson. It has stayed with me in various forms ever since, and I call my weekly conscious dance session church, which is only partly a joke. It is 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, and not something that gets scheduled when everything else is done, but a requirement, like sleep or water, for continuing to function well. There is a particular quality of thinking that only happens when I am 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 have been telling yourself you believe.
The mountains specifically. Something about scale. Something about the reminder that most of what feels urgent, isn't.
