Daventry, Northamptonshire, UK. I now had the life, of which I had been dreaming since childhood. I changed my name formally to Bernadette Jeanne by simple translation, conveniently retaining my initials and hence signature. Now well into my sixties, planning for the future started once again.

The broadcast media were settling down to the provision of digital services for both sound and vision. A final step was agreement about terrestrial, as distinct from satellite digital television. Although I still got most of my concepts adopted, the pressure for ever more channels resulted in decisions which I felt were not optimum.

I knew it was time to call quits. The permanent secretary (the very top civil servant) of a government department said at a dinner, “How did we not appreciate that Bernadette was really a woman? It is so obvious; she gets her way by looking for a valid compromise, not like a man who just wants to win at any cost.”

My house organ became quite well known and I had been maintaining and tuning the organs in our two parish churches for years, linking back to early childhood when I had worried about the value of À and root 2. Thin

Daventry, Northamptonshire, UK. In 1986 we lived near the Thames valley town of Maidenhead in Berkshire, on a flight path from Heathrow Airport. Peace, the need for a bigger music studio and more office space indicated a move so each weekend we drove on a radial path from London looking at places and property.

By the new year nothing had appeared and we were about to give up when the details of an early 17th century farm house and barn with outbuildings in the midlands appeared. It looked perfect. Only my mother, who had reduced snobbery to a science said with some disapproval, “The Midlands, that’s the Black Country!” [1] We still went to look.

In the farmhouse kitchen was a basket with kittens, outside were horses and Labrador dogs. In ten minutes, I was already having the barn restored for music with the organ across the end and a room on the first floor that could be fitted out as an office. By late 1987 it had all happened.

The down side was that I found it much more difficult to cope with the constraints upon the woman inside in spite of work, our new house and music. The vicar had only taken hours to establish that an organist ha

Cupertino, CA, USA. I’ve been wanting to publish this post for almost 2 years now but haven’t mainly because I hadn’t figured out how to communicate my story without sounding like a victim, a bitter shrew, or a resentful killjoy, all of which at various points since I left that career to be frankly honest, had been true.

I kept struggling with sharing my story not because I’m afraid that future employers would Google me and then not hire me. No, I’m more afraid of letting go of the ledge and trusting that I will land safely in the life work that I am really supposed to do. If I hang onto the pain of the past, I can use it as an excuse for not moving forward. (Can you hear Dr. Phil already?) The pain of the past is comforting not because I like it but because I know it. Who knows what’s out there in the future? It’s more comforting to be with the devil you know than the one you don’t, right?

But no more excuses. No more writing drafts and no more waiting for the right time to tell the story perfectly. I still don’t know how to write this with my normal panache but whatever. It has to be told because I’m tired of keeping it in, and it is like