'What's happened to ya?' - Susie

It's who you know, what you know and where you know, that affects who gets sent to prison and for how long. There's people doing tax evasion and scamming millions over the top of stuff, who get a slap on the wrist, whereas someone tryna get a few extra quid on top of benefits are screwed left right and center, because they're in the poor world.

Childhood

When I was young, my parents weren't really there for me, they threw parties on weekends and my dad would go off away back to sea and my mam was in the pub all the time on the piss, so we didn't see her much. My dad would come home from sea to a big alcohol bill, and he started experimenting with drugs and he had to pay for that too, so he said to my mam "well why don't you just do a bit of hustle when I'm away to pay your way", so she sat us down and told us she'd have to go and work on the streets.

When I was 6 my mum and dad started separating, we moved to a council estate on Preston Road. My mam went from having money to having none, and the family just stopped bothering with her as much. It wasn't my mam's fault, these things happen.

I remember that time my mum was struggling on benefits, she would still take me on my birthday to get me a pair of jeans, 10 quid, arrow jeans, with a white stripe, it was a right rage, from Kingston Jeanery…. God knows how my mam managed, but I guess she didn't manage. My brothers dealt with it by throwing themselves into education whereas I wanted to be at home and look after me mam cos I seen my mam upset and crying all the time, I was in that caring role.

Prison

When I was a teenager, I got pregnant, I had my son, I tried to look after him. First 2 or 3 years I was doing fine and then I hooked up with this guy who was doing gear, and things went from bad to worse, and from worse to worser; I was in and out of prison through my adolescence.

I needed some guidance… you can leave school with your ABC's and your 123's but it doesn't give you no real hands-on life experience so you can start living. Prison didn't help, prison's not the answer to anything. Putting a person in prison for a year costs about £48,000! It's a lot of money. Wages, food, upkeep, travel expenses to and from court, chaperones… I think if you could abolish prisons and use the money that its costs to keep a prisoner into education, training, helping people to have a job…

In prison I did catering and I learnt how to milk a cow. It wasn't much fun. In a milking shed with the snow, stood in the gully, putting sucky pads on them, stood right where they can shit. Milk 'em for 5-10 mins and then go until all the cows are milked, hard work. It's slave labour really, it doesn't matter how many towels you sew the ends off you still only get 4.52 at the end of the week.

Did I get Life skills in prison? Well I certainly was more criminally minded, you get that kind of education! The first time I got locked up it was for shop lifting and fraudulent behaviour, a few quid here and there just to survive. I got 6 months and served 8 weeks. I was really fuckin nervous and giggled when I got the sentence, didn't really know what it meant, you don't realise what it actually entails. The last time I got lock up it was for armed robbery, I got 30 months.

It's alright saying you don't wanna do anything criminal to keep your head above water, but a lot of people don't have a choice, they don't get enough money to live on. Look at me mam, she was a single mum, with 3 kids all under the age of 15 and she was on £14 pounds a week. You need a bit to have a life that's actually worth living.

From my very late teens to my mid-twenties I'd done 3 prison sentences. A lot of that time was spent trying to get my son back home. I was 26/27 and living in a hostel when I met the girl's dad, that was a great thing for me, we were together for 10 years, I wish it lasted longer. He had time for me… care, loving, giving…. he didn't provide financial security; we did that together. I had my lovely daughter Charlotte, I was clean before I got pregnant with her, and she was perfect in every way. Here she is in this picture…she lived for 5 months, before pneumonia took her.

When I came off the gear I came off the gear, stopped it, end of. That wasn't the advice I got, they wanted to put me on methadone, but I just wanted to stop. I was ready to stop. Simple as.

Telling my story

The buzz word now is 'lived experience'. To be someone with lived experience and be asked to talk about it, to re-live my trauma, has not been easy.

My role in 'Trauma informed city' is being in meetings, changing processes and policies, challenging police, council, social workers, all them across the board who are supposed to be there to catch those struggling to live. We wanna make a better system where people aren't just saying 'what's wrong with ya', they're saying 'what's happened to ya?'.

Even in these trauma informed services and circles, I have sometimes felt undermined and judged. The concern isn't always for my welfare, but for how they looked, how am I making them look. Sometimes I've felt, why am I doing this, who am I doing it for, for whose benefit? And sometimes I've felt divided from my colleagues. I want them to learn from it, to be understanding and compassionate. At these meetings I've often felt like my words are not really valid, I feel a bit lost in knowing what I'm supposed to be doing, and how. But what I say IS valid.

I've practiced telling my story loads now. Telling my story for AN UNTOLD STORY retraumatized me; I'd spent 22 years clean and I relapsed after that. I don't regret doing it, I want people to know, learn and understand how hard it is to fucking survive. ('An untold story' (the book) is authored by a collective of women with lived experience of street sex working in Hull, and allies). Before that, on channel 4's DISPATCHES, there was single parent families, people in dire straits, talking about what it was like to be on the breadline. The TV programme benefitted from my exposure, but I didn't. A lot of people pointed their finger and laughed at me, cos I bared my soul, what I'd been doing to survive; my family turned their back on me. But it was powerful, the things I got to say in it, and in the long run, I help more people than I don't, cos of my experiences.

NOW

I've never understood my mental health that well at all, it's been hard to navigate; depression, anxiety, where do you go? what do you do? I don't understand.I want some life coaching, some focus on what I'm doing next, where I'm going. I dunno what God's plan for me is, I keep trying to have my arms open wide.

There's art in everyone, be it verbal, physical, transgressional, there's so many ways you can be artistic. I want to make a collage of an elephant family- matriarch and her baby. I was gunna do it in grey material, different shaped circles. I think the ways that elephants' families are is great; the males aren't top boss; the eldest female in the pack is the leader! I'm around a lot of strong women now. It's just as well innit?! Without ORTS I don't know what I'd do. Orts means bits and pieces, scraps that are usually thrown away, which we make things out of. Anna means a lot to me, she's like that for a lot of people, she's got a lot of shit going on as well. And Liz, I'm always jolly when I see her, she brings out the song in me, everything's a bit joyful.