On August 15, 2015, CBS Chicago ran a story about Richard Wooten with a headline that told you exactly what the reporters thought mattered that day: “Retiring Chicago Cop Not Done Making City Safe.” Twenty-three years on the job, and the coverage was already about what came next — the community work, the advocacy, the next chapter.
That’s a fair story. It’s just not the whole one.
The day the badge came off
Nobody writes a headline about what happens the week after the story runs. There’s no camera crew for that part. The uniform goes in a bag, the routines that structured two decades of your life disappear overnight, and you’re left with something almost nobody warns you about: time to notice things you didn’t have time to notice before.
For twenty-three years, certain things had just been normal. The way you scan a room when you walk into it. The way you don’t fully relax, even at home, even with people you trust. The way you’ve gotten so good at compartmentalizing what you see on a shift that you’ve started compartmentalizing everything else too. None of that felt like a problem while the job needed it from you every day. It felt like being good at your job.
It’s only afterward — when the job stops asking for it, and the compartments don’t have anywhere left to put things — that you start to wonder whether “normal” was ever the right word for it.
You don’t notice the water until you’re out of it
That’s the honest version of what the next chapter actually looked like for Richard. Not a straight line from badge to purpose, the way a headline likes to tell it, but a slower process of finding out — in conversations with a counselor, in the quiet that retirement makes room for — that a lot of what he’d been calling normal for twenty-five years wasn’t. It wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t something broken in him. It was what two-plus decades of service does to a person, whether that service happened on patrol, in a squad room, overseas, or on a scene most people only see on the news.
He didn’t discover this because someone diagnosed him with something. He discovered it the way most veterans and first responders eventually do — a counselor asked a question that landed differently than he expected, or someone who loved him said, gently, you know that’s not normal, right? And once you hear it named, you can’t un-hear it.
If you’re in your first two years out
If you left the job, the uniform, or the unit recently — in the last year or two, or even the last few months — this might be the part of the story that sounds the most familiar. The adjustment period after service doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as the service itself. People ask what you did. Almost nobody asks what it’s like now that you’re not doing it.
Here’s what’s worth hearing, from someone who’s been on the other side of it for years: the fact that something feels off right now doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It usually means the water you were swimming in for twenty-three years is finally visible, now that you’re standing outside of it. That’s not a life sentence. It’s information — and it’s the first honest thing a lot of veterans and retired officers get to feel in a long time.
What this isn’t
This isn’t a program that promises to erase what service cost you, and it isn’t an assessment of what’s “wrong.” Richard isn’t offering treatment, and he’s not offering a diagnosis. What he’s offering is a conversation with someone who has actually stood where you’re standing — badge or boots off, structure gone, trying to figure out what normal is supposed to look like now — and who has walked through that same discovery himself.
Some of what you’re carrying deserves more specialized support than a conversation can provide, and Richard will tell you that plainly and help point you toward it. That’s not a failure of the process. It’s the process working the way it’s supposed to.
If what you’re carrying feels urgent or unsafe right now — for you or someone you love — please don’t wait on a blog post or a consultation to address it. Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), call 911, or go to your nearest emergency room. See our Crisis & Safety Notice for more. Everything else here can wait until you’re safe.
Richard Wooten is a United States Army veteran, a retired Chicago Police Officer, and minister and founder of The Gathering Point.
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