For the last ten years, I’ve been writing a medical-thriller series titled Greenhaven.

I understand that, to some ears, it sounds a little crazy to pursue something for so long and not have anything concrete in your hand to say, “this is what I’ve got for it.” But I believe that, with anything in life, it’s about the journey you go on — the character you build — and the moments that stack up quietly, no matter how difficult or isolating they feel, or how long they go on for, before the moment finally arrives.

Last week I came across a quote attributed to, I believe, Werner Herzog: it’s better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to not pursue anything at all. It resonated with me. A simple maxim alluding to the fact that some things in life feel less like choices and more like callings — and when you have the latter, believe me, you will know it.

The next question is: “How many callings do we have?” One? Two? Four? I don’t have the answer to that, and truth be told, I have no interest in knowing. I think we have many callings throughout our life. I also believe that what we deem our calling is only that if we are committed to helping the world with what we’re doing. Anyhow, what I do know is that Greenhaven is one of mine.

After all, the foundations and origins of the story are very dear to me. Fragments of it began brewing inside me when I was sixteen years old — in hospital waiting rooms and through sleepless nights at the local hospital — during my late mother’s illness.

My mother, Yasmin — a community worker, friend, and one of my earliest teachers — was diagnosed with an extremely rare autoimmune disease when I was ten years old. For much of my childhood, the clinical white walls of Southampton General Hospital became all too familiar. A place where, for six long years, she would be in and out, spending, it seemed, more time there than at home.

At sixteen years old, three months before she would pass away , I sat in my Film Studies class daydreaming when a single scene popped into my head:

A boy running down a flight of stairs in a tower block — documents in hand — being pursued by a man in black.

The main gist of the show came almost immediately. I can honestly say that, all these years later, I have never had a moment like that since. The knowing that this — whatever this was — was special. I knew right then that it was going to be a television series. That it would be known globally. That people would resonate with it — and that it would become one of the great television dramas of its time.

Of course, it’s difficult to prove that, or much of anything, to the world when you’re sixteen years old — skinny, spotty, hungry, failing most of your college grades, and too poor to buy enough food to fill your 6’4 frame.

And so, following her passing, on December 20th 2016 - five days before Christmas, I began work on the story.

Using a secondhand iMac gifted to me by the Young Carers group I was part of, I began the groundwork of actualising this dream. I spent many nights in my bedroom, overcome with a state of this intense euphoria, typing away the first pilot of Greenhaven. A few months later, just shy of my eighteenth birthday, I received my first rejection letter from a BBC production company (something I still proudly possess).

I worked in a theatre, attended acting classes, went to uni for a couple of months to study film, dropped out, decided to spend three years in libraries and coffee shops learning what makes a good story - reading the likes of Billy Wilder to Aaron Sorkin, returned to University to study Ba Hons ‘English Literature with Creative Writing’, hustled my way into production for a national broadcaster, and even booked a one way-flight to China to teach Drama at a top-performing high-school.

Across countries, classrooms, and seasons of life, Greenhaven has stayed with me. Each moment only going to deepen the story and the world.

Just as I said it when I was that sixteen-year-old who didn’t have much to give but ‘thank you’, I say it again, with the same conviction, ten years later: Greenhaven has the DNA to be one of the greatest television series of all time.

Now, this year, ten years on from where it all began, and along with the support of Carin Van Den Bosch, I am committed to pitching Greenhaven to US networks — Netflix and HBO — by December 20th, 2026 - bringing Greenhaven to the home that it deserves.

See you on the other side.