Being an Ally Has Enriched My Life
When I met Julie Longden [see previous article], I loved her bright, easy welcoming, and we became friends over child-minding and cups of tea. Early on I mentioned that I was a Co-Counsellor. I didn’t make a big deal of it, but Julie kept wanting to know more. I wanted us to deepen our friendship alongside sharing RC, and we managed to do that with the help of other Co-Counsellors. Julie has always been open and generous in her friendship with me—for example, taking me with her to some of the hardest events in her family’s life.
I can be seen as English, Southern [Southern English], and middle class, which I am, but I am also the child of a raised-poor Indigenous immigrant and was raised Orthodox Irish Catholic in a thriving mainly Irish Catholic community. My relationship with Julie, and other friends, has ensured that I keep these other identities alive in the face of the chronic assimilation patterns that led me into middle-class work that was oppressive to me, my family, and young people.
Over the years I‘ve begun to wake up to how I as an English middle-class woman have been conditioned to live in a bubble of false optimism about myself, for example, “I’ll be happy once I get that new sofa,” and about the class system, racism, and colonisation, for example, “If only everyone would ____, then everything would be okay.” I’ve had to struggle to see, hear, and think about what life is like for raised-poor people and to keep looking, to not turn away. Without Co-Counselling this would have been too hard. Even with it I have moved away from the raised-poor area I lived in because my husband, who is not in Co-Counselling, got so discouraged.
Continually learning how to be led by and be a good ally to Julie has enriched my life and given my retirement purpose and meaning. But it has been hard to figure out when and how to share my thinking, and to always back [support] Julie whilst doing that.
She and I give each other a hand [help each other] both inside and outside of Co-Counselling. We connect nearly daily and spend seven hours together each week on our project. Julie obtained a degree in Community Development, has twenty years’ experience empowering raised-poor and currently poor women, and has a rapidly growing reputation for acting consistently with courage and integrity. We are slowly and deliberately setting up an organisation to end poverty, led by Julie.
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England
(Present Time 192, July 2018)