I was homeless and an addict as a teen. I hope my life can help people have a little more empathy

Filmmaker Lorna Tucker is known for her acclaimed feature documentaries Westwood, Amá and Call Me Kate. Last year, she released a hugely personal film, Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son, a documentary that humanises homelessness, telling the stories of people with first-hand experience, including Big Issue vendors and Tucker herself. Having run away from home as a teenager, Lorna Tucker suffered greatly while living on the streets – experiences she didn’t discuss until the film came out. One year later, she writes about how perspectives on homelessness have shifted.

Time going slowly passes incredibly fast. This past year there were moments when I felt that my legs couldn’t carry me, and I would just lie on the kitchen floor unable to move. The fear was sometimes so intense I was frozen in time. Am I always going to feel like this, no matter how far I go, how fast I run or whatever I manage to achieve in this one fleeting life that I have? Will this feeling never go away?

This happens often, but it always does pass. And the sun finally comes out again, and I remind myself how lucky I am. I stuck around, even when I didn’t feel life would ever ease up for me, and eventually found a passion that has set me free from myself and that negative voice that whispers from my shoulder. 

I found a way out of the darkness through art. Through storytelling. I became utterly devoted to writing, to learning… to get over the fear of making mistakes, or fucking up. I have learnt to sit through silence and turn my noisy, busy brain from shouting inwards to pouring it outwards onto the page. 

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The characters I create in fiction, or the artists I make documentaries with, become a vessel for my thoughts and feelings, for the times we are living in, politically and socially. That is the power of art. Throughout history, it is the people coming together who create real social and systemic change. We have never needed that more than now. 

I guess in my own small way, that’s why I made Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son, a film that explores how you can end homelessness in all its forms if the focus and will politically are there. It was a deeply personal film that ripped me to shreds, and it was only possible to make with the support of my incredible team who held me up through its process and the support of this magazine, Big Issue. It was released in cinemas last year, and it was this that led to the biggest and messiest, but most transformative and empowering, year of my life.

After the film was released, I partnered with Lord John Bird, Crisis, Shelter, the Centre for Homelessness Research and The London Connection and threw myself headfirst into shining a light on something I did know something about, highlighting the incredible work organisations are doing to tackle this huge and complex issue.

What came with that ripping off of the plaster was a fear so heavy that the lead-up to the film’s release left me almost crippled with anxiety and fear. I have always felt nervous sharing my work with the world, whether film scripts or completed movies. I can’t even sit in on screenings and have to hide in the loos watching cartoons on my phone until it ends before I do the Q&A. I never stop feeling surprised when people like them and the reviews come back full of praise. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have a strange confidence in my ideas, but there is something about sharing them with others that fills me full of dread. This time was different. This time I felt emotionally bare, there was no fiction to hide behind.

Heart thumping. Hands sweating. The moment arrives to share my soul with a room of 250 strangers. I stop outside the door to the theatre, I’ve changed my mind, I can’t do this. I pinch a cigarette from a stranger to prolong this moment. Then the producers spot me and bring me in and surround me with love and warmth… Then I spot friends, the ones that understand why this weighs on me so heavily. I introduce the film, a sea of faces looking back at me. I leave them to witness. And hide.

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After the film we step out onto the stage and the applause brings me to tears. Why are they clapping? Do you still like me? Are you not as ashamed as I am of the life that I have lived? 

The reception to Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son was more than I could have ever expected. It set in motion sold-out screenings throughout the UK, a movement of people writing to their MPs demanding the policy changes that we stated at the end of the film that will help eradicate homelessness and move us towards a world where no one has to live on the streets or in unsafe housing. 

I worked alongside Prince William’s Homewards initiative advising and helping to curate an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, sharing my story with the prince and discussing the work we were both doing to change the narrative around homelessness and addiction. 

I was asked to be part of a roundtable discussion with the mayor of London to help inform how he would be tackling homelessness in London. The film kept selling out and its release lasted far longer than any of us had anticipated. And then came the news that we had received investment so the film could be released for free on YouTube. So that anyone could watch it, anywhere in the world for free. This for me was everything.

Then in the spring it was time for me to get back to making films and I started production of Garbo: Where Did You Go? It was the creative, experimental collaboration I needed. I wanted to breathe life into something new, I wanted performers, actors, puppets. It is released here in the UK in May after an incredible run in theatres in Scandinavia. And now I’m in production with something new – the most exciting documentary yet, but for now that’s all I can say.

After delving into my own life story, I wanted to take all of me, all of what I am, and use it to inform the way I tackle and choose to tell stories. So I started working on my first solo art exhibition which is supposed to be top secret but I have too much of a big mouth for that. Keep an eye out for news later this year.

Alongside filming and editing Garbo I juggled my days working on my first book, Bare, published by Brazen later this month. This was a very different experience, spending my early mornings drinking coffee at my desk as my memories floated around me, flowing from my fingers as a stream of visual consciousness. 

The documentary and now the book have been confronting the very thing I have spent my life running from and it has helped me to fully accept my past, and the part it has to play in who I am and the work I create.

If making the documentary was my way of bringing together people with lived experience to show that with the right help and support people who have slipped through the net CAN turn their lives around, Bare is me inviting people to come with me through this part of my life, this first part that ended when I was 16. To immerse them into my life then, what led up to me living on the streets of London, and how life unfolded. 

I decided to tell my story in hopefully what will be three books on the different lives I have lived to become the person that I am now, while still acknowledging that I am, like all of us, a very messy person at times. I’m not perfect. But I hope my life can help people have a little more empathy and understanding of what leads people into homelessness, addiction, and the many situations I found myself in on this journey to find myself. If you’d asked me 12 years ago when I was detoxing from heroin for the last time what I dreamed my ideal life would look like, it wouldn’t be too far from here. For a life off benefits. A loving family. And to earn a living as an artist. This is a new era for me, one full of a kind of gratitude for all that I have, and everything I have yet to do.

But now I know I am more than just my past, I have so much more to give. I am currently casting for my first narrative feature that will be filming later this year, a thriller, and have just finished writing a horror… and starting a gothic, trippy children’s film trilogy. I want to bring big and bold storytelling to our screens, I want to branch out into a commercial sphere where films can get as big an audience as possible, but there will always be a social message within. 

I have finally accepted the process of my creation. Each time I ride the wave of ideas, I have an understanding that a kind of sadness will follow. And I’m OK with that. It’s the darkness that pushes me onwards and is the founding place of all my ideas and desire to colour everything I touch with a form of a social message. A desire to, through art, make people feel a little better about their lives, and that there is a way out. To keep walking, even when things feel like they will never let up.

With such pain and suffering in the world, more than ever that we need to use our creativity to unite and entertain. Entertainment is the best way to get a message into the houses of the masses. We need to use art as a weapon to wake people out of sleepwalking through the chaos of our times and sinking into hopelessness. The only thing I have as an artist is my way of projecting my feelings on a page, on a screen, on a stage. This is where my journey is heading.

Onwards. By looking back over this past year I now can move forwards. 

Bare by Lorna Tucker is out now (Octopus, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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