Weeks after my visit to Doris Chamberlain the reading seemed to constantly prey on mind especially as I desperately wanted to follow a normal life as possible, naively convincing myself while growing up that I could.
My reason for telling colleagues at work was not for the purpose of doing readings, although I did continue to do them for fun in my dinner hour, but to enable me to be myself around them. I did not want to feel I always had something to hide or be embarrassed about. I think it was then that I set out to prove Mrs Chamberlain wrong, and like many young people going through their teenage years I became rebellious, not towards my family or people in this world, but to those in the spirit world.
I simply refused to accept that my fate was to work with spirit and for a while my visions became much less frequent, at last I felt I was living my life to the full.
My career in the Civil Service continued to flourish and I loved working in a profession where promotion prospects for women (this was the 70's) was possible.
From being a very young child my mind set was to apply for the Police Force when I was nineteen, and this was still on my agenda as I turned eighteen in June 1976. However a couple of months later fate really did take it's course as I became the girlfriend of Richard Cryer, a young man I fell deeply in love with at secondary school (he had no idea) and we were engaged within twelve weeks of our first date.
Before agreeing to marry Richard I felt it was only right that he also knew of my gift and spiritual experiences, so once again I was opening my secret while dreading the concequences incase he decided to end our relationship. After I had awkwardly explained everything, he simply looked at me and said "I will support you on anything including this, it changes nothing!" ( He remains to this day a man of few words). Little did he know how much he would need to be there for me in the future, selflessly supporting the demands of my work when it eventually became vocational.
The next few months felt a whirlwind of happy times as we continued to see each other every day and at weekends we would share our other great passion "Northern Soul". Life could not seem further away from me being a medium and although I still had spiritual visitors and visions, I truly felt that I had it all under control. Perhaps I did until a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday when I was told off the record that I could not possibly be accepted in to the Police Force with my psychic abilities, so my dream of applying crashed around me.
Following this huge disappointment I began to throw myself back into my job in the Civil Service as I still enjoyed what I was doing there, and realised that we have to accept in life that some things are simply not meant to be....a mind set I would encourage so many others to think like in my many years of readings to come.
During all this time of concentrating on my career and personal life I overlooked that my few months break from spiritual activity was coming to an end, and I was regularly starting to experience night time visits from deceased people along with hearing messages they wanted to communicate to loved ones in this world.
I was still living at home with my parents and as with many years previous they had to once again support me through my broken sleep and what often felt like nightmares that I had no control over, however this time I decided to ask my spiritual visitors what they wanted from me and the same answer came back over and over again "work with us, be our voice!" Perhaps if I tried doing this they would eventually tire of me and go away I remember saying to my mum "but where do I begin" I asked her "and who with".
My mum gave me one of her loving glances and said in her sweet Geordie voice "what will be will be our Julie, you were born to do this".
The following day at work I was approached by a colleague who had heard of my lunchtime activities (readings) and she asked if I would do a reading for a friend of her mum as she had lost a child and just needed to know that she would one day see him again. Although I felt very nervous at the idea of speaking to someone away from the comfort of work friends, I decided to say yes in the hope I may be able to help in some way.
We arranged the reading for one evening after work and Richard drove me to the lady's home in South Yorkshire, then he sat patiently outside in his works van for almost two hours while I did what became my first professional reading.
Even I was shocked at how much I could tell this heartbroken mum about her tragic loss while I was seeing and describing her son in as much detail as possible. Although she cried throughout most of the reading, she told me that her tears had turned to tears of joy simply knowing that her son knew how much she still loved him and that they would one day be together again.
The lady kindly offered me money for her reading which I quickly refused as I felt this gift was meant to be "given away" and I was very happy to do that in the circumstances.
On the journey home I discussed with Richard how special the night had felt for me too and we both agreed that if that was something I was meant to do then we would allow it to be apart of our lives, not realising that one day it would completely take over our lives altogether... to be continued.