09. Coming Back to Life

The story of Bernadette — a woman who survived domestic violence, addiction and homelessness, and who now helps others find the stage she nearly never made it to herself.

The officer’s head turned around in the front seat of the police car.

He looked at her with a sad face. She had just been told she was probably going to Eastwood Park. She had said: good. And he wanted to know what she meant by good.

She told him. Nobody was helping her. She needed a meal. She needed a roof over her head. She needed someone to give her that space. Just that. Just space.

She walked out of court the next day. Back onto the streets.

She tells me this the way she tells everything — directly, without flinching, with the occasional laugh that lands exactly where it’s supposed to. She is sitting across from me in Plymouth, eleven years clean, fresh off an emotional week watching the people she works with perform on stage at the Drum Theatre. She cried twice before we got through the second question.

She is Bernie. She is one of the most alive people I have ever met.

*

The First Hit

She grew up in Stafford, moved through a village called Wheaton Aston, moved again. Her parents split up. The years shifted. By fourteen she was in a relationship she didn’t yet have words for, with a man who would go on to keep her trapped in a volatile domestic violence situation for a decade. By fifteen she was a mother. By the time she left, she had children, no network, no roots, and no experience of navigating her own emotions because she had spent years managing his.

She moved to Weston-super-Mare to start again. She was going to be an independent mum. She had it together.

And then she started using heroin.

She is characteristically honest about what it felt like. The best orgasm you’ll ever get. She says this with a bluntness that is actually kindness — if you understand what it felt like, you understand why it was so hard to stop. She had come from a decade of having no voice, no body autonomy, no version of herself that belonged to her. The first hit gave her something. Power. Volume. A feeling she had buried so completely she had forgotten it was possible.

Within three weeks, she had stolen eight and a half thousand pounds from work. The children went to their dad’s. She lost the house. And then she was on the streets.

“When you were up against nothing, you kind of just give up.”

She says this quietly. It is the saddest sentence in the whole conversation. Not because she gave up — she didn’t, not entirely, not even then — but because the systems that were supposed to help her weren’t there. Police. Support services. Nowhere to go. When you reach for help and nothing comes back, the reaching stops.

But the wanting didn’t stop. That’s what stayed.

*

The Mum in London

She ended up in London with a man whose family didn’t fully know the extent of what was happening. And every morning, she watched his mum get up and go to work.

She watched her the way you watch something you want so badly you can’t look away. The routine. The purpose. The ordinary dignity of a woman with somewhere to be and someone expecting her.

She doesn’t know if that woman knows what she did. She doesn’t know if she’d believe it. But Bernie watched her every morning and thought: I want that. I want my life back like that.

That is what held the fire in. Not a dramatic epiphany. Not a rock bottom moment. A woman going to work in the morning, not knowing she was being watched, not knowing she was holding someone’s reason to keep going.

Bernie got herself into rehab. In Plymouth. She arrived, sat down, breathed, and thought: all right. Let’s do it.

The detox was, in her words, from hell. She just kept going.

*

The Arm

There is something she shows me. Her right arm. She has had reconstructive surgery. She is disabled on that side now. It started with an injection in her hand. The skin eroded. The hand stuck in position. She walked around for two years with no skin on her hand.

She didn’t go to a doctor because she was afraid they would amputate. The fear of losing her hand was greater, in the logic of addiction, than the reality of what was already happening to it.

She starts physio again tomorrow.

On her eleven year clean birthday — the 23rd of June — she was in hospital having an iron infusion.

“One IV forever. Yeah. But it comes with layers of sadness because you don’t realise the trauma you’re putting your body through until you come out.”

She says this with a dark, perfectly calibrated humour that tells you everything about how she carries it. Not with bitterness. Not with self-pity. With the specific lightness of someone who knows exactly what it cost and has made a kind of peace with the accounting.

*

Kerry. Then Sarah.

Her first probation officer lied about her. It happens. Bernie got reassigned to a woman called Kerry.

She walked in and sat down. Kerry looked at her and said: it’s okay, I’ve read your file.

That was it. Four words and a face that meant them. Kerry had read the file and was still in the room. Still looking at her like she was someone. That was the beginning of something.

Then Plymouth. Then a woman called Sarah, who was running Our Space at Theatre Royal Plymouth when Bernie arrived in the city. Sarah gave her a reference for a flat. Then a reference for a job. Then pointed her toward an interview at the theatre counting money.

Bernie sat in the interview and started crying.

She told them: you can google me. I stole a lot of money. Why have you got me here counting your money?

They gave her a trial.

She has been at Theatre Royal Plymouth ever since. Front of house access supervisor. And now, three years in, assistant on Our Space — the programme she first attended as a participant in 2015, in the thick of her own rebuilding.

She is on the other side of the table now. She is Kerry. She is Sarah.

*

The Stage

Our Space runs in ten-week terms. People arrive carrying homelessness, addiction, anxiety, the not-quite-knowing-where-they-fit. They are given a Thursday morning and a room and a gentle invitation to just be there.

Some stay another ten weeks. Some progress. Some make it all the way to the Drum Theatre — the main stage — where they perform in front of a real audience.

This week they did their share backs on stage. Bernie sent a text the next morning. A young woman phoned her back.

She said: I never thought I’d be able to get up on stage and have somebody sat in the audience watching me.

Bernie cried telling me this. She is not embarrassed about it. She is, she says, an empath. An emotional being at the height of her emotional season. She cries because it matters. Because she knows the distance between where that young woman started and where she was standing on that stage.

Because she has covered that distance herself.

“It’s just the magic of people just coming back to life.”

*

I’ve Got Tea Bags

She talks about what she stands for. Integrity. Honesty. Not wearing a mask. She spent years behind masks — the fine masks, the I’m-coping masks, the masks that kept her hidden and, for a long time, kept her trapped.

She dropped them in Plymouth. In rehab. In Our Space. In the slow, accumulated work of becoming someone who knows exactly who she is and doesn’t need anyone else to confirm it.

I’ve given it the world, she says. The world’s got nothing on me now.

On difficult days, she goes to the water. She breathes. She finds the small things. Last Sunday was a hard day and she went to the sea. She had a moment with a dog and a family who didn’t know they were helping her. She came back.

She talks about gratitude the way people talk about it when they have genuinely had nothing. Not the wellness version. The real version. The version that starts at the bottom of what you have left and works up.

I’ve got tea bags. Because that’s all it comes down to.

She is working toward something. Notes and bits of paper everywhere, ideas coming together in the way they need to. A one-woman show, maybe. Something that can go into schools and prisons and institutions and say to the women inside them: you can come out the other side. You can do this.

She has the platform. She has the story. She has eleven years of proof.

She made cinnamon rolls last week. She is learning to paddle-board. She passed her driving test a couple of years ago and now gets in the car and just goes, because she can, because she is an adult and the only thing that can stop her is herself, and she has had enough conversations with herself to know that voice is wrong.

She is Bernie. She is at the height of her emotional season. She is coming back to life, every day, and she is taking as many people with her as she possibly can.

She wants to be remembered for standing for something.

She already is.

Ascendria Collective celebrates the stories of everyday women. To nominate someone whose story deserves to be told, get in touch.