The Jigsaw Method: How a School Leaver Learned to Write.

Someone told me the other day that I have a “talent for writing”. Who knew?

Whether I do or not is a matter of opinion, I suppose. But here’s what I know - my neurodivergent brain needs to format my thoughts somehow. And writing’s the only way I know how to do that.

You see, I left school at fifteen. Not because I was some kind of genius who’d learned everything early - I got bored with it. The only reason I knew I could write at all was that my English teacher, Bernie Winters, told me so. English and art were the only subjects that interested me. Everything else? Just didn’t stick. And between those two, I found a way of expressing something I didn’t really understand at the time. Something that only years later revealed itself to have a name.

Neurodivergence.

Which is just a fancy way of saying your brain works a bit differently from most people’s.

That phrase people use - “the university of life” - that became literally true for me. My education began the day I left school. I learned by watching, by surviving, by paying attention to what was happening around me. I learned from both sides of the law, and even the worst people I’ve ever encountered became my greatest teachers.

Not in some sentimental way, mind you.

It happened when I looked at them and realised I was looking at a mirror of myself that I didn’t particularly like. That’s the point where change becomes necessary. That recognition. Because sometimes the worst people in our lives teach us the most important things - not because they show us what not to do, but because they show us what we’re capable of becoming if we don’t make different choices.

Turns out arseholes can be excellent teachers, and that’s a fact.

Quick plug here: all this is in my autobiography, available on Amazon Books if you’re interested. And you might be wondering - how do you write a biography when you’ve never done what other people have done? Maybe that is the point. It’s been an unconventional, peripatetic sort of life that most people would never have experienced. Or wanted to, probably.

Look, I’ve always followed my own path in life. I’m not really a pack animal, never have been.

I suppose it’s fair to say that most people’s lives are formatted. Predetermined, even. You do what your parents did, what your grandparents did, what your great-grandparents did. You go to school. Get qualifications. Get a job. Find someone. Get married. A job probably turns into a career. You advance. Get a better house. Buy a better car. Have different holidays. Everything follows that sequence.

And it’s a sequence no one ever stops to question because, I guess, it’s considered that well, that’s what we do. Then, when you do get married, you train your kids to do exactly what you did. And then they have kids and train them to do exactly what they did. The pattern rarely, if ever, changes.

A bit like a production line, really. One generation stamps out the next, which stamps out the next. All coming off the conveyor belt looking remarkably similar.

My life’s been very much out of sequence.

Never had a career to speak of. I’ve got a son, and we maintain a healthy distance - he knows I’m here when needed, values my advice. He’s grown up quite self-sufficient, like me. Rarely asks for anything, but when he does, it has real meaning behind it. Never had any lifelong friends or meaningfully stable relationships until recent years. And I’m still very selective about who I have friendships with. Just dipped in and out of friendships like everything else - part of that educational pattern, really. Learning from people, gaining what I needed to understand something, then moving on. Moved locations, moved on. Never been abroad or done proper holidays - never travelled anywhere except around England, really. Don’t go to restaurants or cinemas. Don’t do celebrations or birthdays or Christmases or anniversaries. No interest in the things people usually bond over - cars, property, pubs. Don’t belong to anything, though I dipped into politics for a while.

I’ve always stopped to think about things. My question would always be why? Why am I doing that? And in a lot of cases, not always, but often enough, the answer was just because everyone else is doing it. And I’ve never been interested in following that particular sequence. I’ve questioned it, found my own way through instead.

We all have agency, don’t we? But we have agency in very different ways. Most people exercise their agency by choosing which version of the sequence to follow - which career, which partner, which house. My agency has been very self-aware and self-contained, I suppose. In respect of not following suit at all. Not doing what everybody else does.

I’ve had a life where I’ve dipped in and out of pretty much everything. Done things to gain enough experience and knowledge to understand them, then moved on. I’ve never been consistent in the way most people are with careers or relationships or anything like that. I just do things until I understand them, extract what I need, then move to the next thing. That’s been the pattern with pretty much everything in my life.

I must seem like the most boring person imaginable to anyone who takes a look at my life.

But that would be completely misreading it.

See, this is my normal abnormal life. And somehow, it works for me.

The fact that I’ve never done what other people do tends to interest some people. They’re not able to get their heads around it, can’t quite comprehend it. So I’ve become something of an interesting curiosity, I suppose. People genuinely want to know what makes me tick.

And equally, when I speak to other people, I want to know what makes them tick. It’s fascinating that they’ve followed the patterns they’ve followed. I’m still learning from it. Still trying to get my head around it. Still writing about it.

They do say opposites attract, don’t they?

It’s not deliberate, any of this. It’s more accidental than Occidental - I haven’t rejected Western cultural norms or anything like that. I’ve just sort of drifted past them, like someone who wasn’t paying attention when everyone else was queuing up for the standard life package. To an outsider, it’s probably a life they could never figure out. “What does he actually do all day?” they’d wonder, probably while booking their next holiday to Tenerife.

But for me? It’s actually the most fascinating, interesting life I could imagine. People will never get their heads around my lifestyle because it’s completely foreign to them. Alien, even.

But to me, it’s inspiring.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. In fact, I feel it’s enriched me. Which is probably what every hermit says, but there you go.

And maybe that enrichment is exactly why the observation part works. I’ve written this before - if you want to properly see a football match, you don’t stand in the middle of the field getting knocked about. You stand to one side and observe what happens at both ends.

Everything I write is based on observation, really. Other people’s experiences. Their lives. Not mine, because mine would make a pretty rubbish reference point for normal human behaviour.

What I do is grab snippets of information wherever I find them. I’ve got books on philosophy, psychology, art - anything that helps me understand how my mind works. Which, let’s be honest, I still don’t fully understand even now. But I’m not a conventional reader anyway. Nowadays, it’s not even mainly books, to be honest.

I can read one sentence on social media and think, that’s interesting, I could write something about that.

And those snippets begin to come together, you see. But not randomly. I’m quite meticulous when it comes to attention to detail. Always have been. Everything has to be in order. I don’t like chaos, never have, avoid chaotic situations when I can. Even in the writing - especially in the writing - it’s all about attention to detail. Getting everything done properly, i’s dotted, t’s crossed.

I don’t always get it right because I’m human like everyone else. And for the most part, it probably makes me look like some kind of control freak to other people. But that attention to detail helps manage what would otherwise be a very chaotic mind.

See, the more chaos we have around us, the more chaotic we become. Those who live their lives minimally should, in theory, have the least chaos of all. If you have chaos in your immediate surroundings, in your home, then everything else becomes chaotic. That’s my belief anyway. Marie Kondo built an entire philosophy on it, so I’m probably not far off.

Building this picture, I can work on and write from. Like a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing, and you’re not entirely sure what the final image is supposed to be. But somehow the fragments get assembled anyway. Carefully. Methodically. And as a result, there’s writing.

Though even the process doesn’t follow what you’d call normal patterns.

I wake up at three in the morning full of ideas, scribble them all down while everyone else is asleep, then drift back off. I’m absolutely knackered for the rest of the day until I finally get my head together and assemble something into shape that people might find vaguely interesting. Or not. Hard to say, really.

I can look at finished articles sometimes and think, did I actually just write that?

Which is either quite impressive or mildly concerning, depending on how you look at it.

These pieces come from all these little jigsaw puzzle fragments my brain manages to retrieve - philosophy, politics, sociology, so many different things. I do my homework, mind you. Research things properly because I like to get things right. But I find these pieces stored away in my memory somehow, put them together in whatever way seems to work, and before I know it, there’s an article sitting there.

Opinions form as the pieces start connecting. A thought emerges from joining up the dots. Eventually, those dots meet and create the picture.

Except my picture happens to be in words.

Why This Actually Matters.

I’m telling you all this not because I particularly need to be understood - that’s just grovelling, sycophantic nonsense I’m not interested in. But sometimes an explanation helps people, you know? This is just me explaining myself without any real need to, but it probably helps you understand where I’m coming from when you read my stuff.

Or at least why I sound the way I do.

Here’s the thing I’ve realised - I see reflections absolutely everywhere.

In politics. In sociology. In policy decisions. Everything is ultimately just a reflection of ourselves - patterns we either recognise and reject, or recognise and end up repeating.

When I write about Bristol’s Green administration, I’m seeing those mirrors reflected back. Something triggers a thought in me, and I can transform it into writing. I look at a policy and think, that’s not right, or that’s familiar, or that’s just the same old nonsense dressed up in different clothes.

I recognise the pattern because I’ve seen it before.

In people. In systems. In myself, if I’m being honest. Which is usually where the most uncomfortable recognitions happen.

That’s what this jigsaw method actually does, you see. It allows pattern recognition across completely different domains. A behavioural pattern in an individual can look remarkably similar to one playing out in an institution. The formatted life sequence - school, qualifications, job, marriage, career advancement, property ladder, training the next generation to do the same - that’s a pattern. And once you’ve seen it in individuals, you start seeing it in how institutions operate, how policies get made, how systems perpetuate themselves.

The fragments connect up. The picture starts emerging. And sometimes that picture turns out to be really quite unflattering.

Being outside all the normal structures probably helps with this. I’m not defending a career I never had, a property portfolio I never built, a political tribe I never joined, a social position I never achieved.

I’m just watching the game and calling what I see.

Which, let’s be completely honest, is considerably easier when you’re not actually on the pitch getting knocked about.

Formal education teaches you to absorb these whole narratives, accept certain frameworks, work within established structures of thought. My neurodivergent wiring never really allowed for any of that. Instead, I just collect fragments and recombine them in novel ways - which turns out to be exactly the kind of approach that can produce original insight rather than just regurgitated analysis.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I’m lying awake at three in the morning, wondering if any of this actually makes sense.

Most people just carry the wounds from their difficult experiences around with them. I somehow managed to extract lessons from mine, file them away somewhere, to make them useful for something.

That ability to metabolise experience, to turn observation into some kind of understanding - I think that’s what makes the writing actually work for neurodivergent writers. We process differently, see connections others might miss, and question sequences that seem natural to everyone else.

So when you read my articles and find yourself wondering how someone without any formal qualifications can write with any kind of authority about complex topics - well, this is how. The jigsaw method. A single sentence spotted on social media can trigger an entire piece because it somehow activates all those stored fragments, brings them together into something coherent.

I drifted around for many years, you know. Never really settled anywhere for long. Bristol’s actually the only place I’ve spent any real length of time in.

Maybe that’s the whole point, actually.

Maybe I needed to do all those things other people haven’t done - all that drifting about, all that observing from the outside, all that dipping in and out to extract what I needed - to finally arrive at the point where I could put some roots down in Bristol and actually collate everything I’ve experienced and everything I know, and turn it all into writing.

And here’s what I’ve learned from all that going back, all that revisiting: you never really finish learning anything. You just collect more pieces, see new patterns, make different connections. The jigsaw keeps expanding. New fragments keep appearing. The picture keeps changing.

Look, it’s not perfect, any of this. It’s probably not what you’d call conventional.

But it’s honest, it’s rigorous in its own way, and it keeps getting better.

And whether I actually have talent for it or not - well, someone told me I do.

Who knew?

That, I suppose, is all any of us can really aim for.