Well done CAN Young Peoples Team on being awarded a commendation  in the High Sheriff’s National Crimebeat awards for ‘their outstanding contribution to help reduce crime and creating a safer community’.

Our N-Gage team have also supported us in this work and the new peer mentoring programme will benefit the clients we have worked with enabling them to sustain the changes made  to achieve a better future.

GERALDINE

“A lost soul”, “a hopeless case”, is what people saw when they looked at me.  I was dying and there was nothing I could do about it.  I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to die only knowing the life I had known. I wanted to live, to see life.
 
I was a child alcoholic, totally maladjusted to life.  I experienced everything you couldn’t possibly imagine a human being experiencing, or surviving.  At 24yrs old I was admitted to my first Mental Hospital.  Institutions became a place where I felt safe, and protected from myself.  I was a tornado roaring through the lives of everyone I met.  I would have swapped my life for the beggars life on the street, because even they seemed to have more than what I had.  I had lost my mind, and suffered internal grief.  I thought I was a bad person, a bad mother, an alcoholic, and I knew I was crazy.
 
I didn’t know how to “DO LIFE”. I had to reach my death bed, my spirit had to be broken, the super ego within me had to be smashed, I had to mentally return to be that 13yr old child again.
 
Then my life began again, a new one, I had woken up from my nightmare, 19yrs had passed away. I didn’t know who I was, I had no identity, I was in fear, but I was free. My demons no longer controlled me.
 
Life became exciting, I had to learn everything, my children were brought home to me, I had to learn to be a mother, and a good person to myself.  I went back to school done my English and Maths GCSE.  I had never been able to read or write properly, but I managed to stay and study for 6yrs, and graduated with an Honours Degree in Fine Art.
 
For 12yrs I have given something back to the community.  I have done voluntary work with YMCA Bedfordshire with young alcoholics and drug addicts.
I have been an active member to Alcoholics Anonymous, and opened many meetings in Bedford.  Today there are meetings 6 days a week in Bedford.
I have had the opportunity to witness and help families that are torn apart, by the destruction of the alcoholic, and helped them to rebuild their lives.
 
I have the experience, not to tell them how, to do it, but to show them how I did it.
 
What balances my life today is what I do for myself, my creativity in doing Fine Art.  For me it is another language of communication, and still carries the message of HOPE.
 
In my alcoholic days all I ever did was dream.  Today my dream has come true.