Julianne Harvey

I struggle to reconcile kindness with authenticity. So often they seem like opposite ends of the spectrum.

In helping my daughter through friend issues, I feel as if authenticity is at odds with inclusion. Do I teach her to look after herself first, even if this means backing away from a friendship that tends to bring more frustration now than support? But if I also advise her to be as kind as possible, what is she supposed to do when kindness to this person means a type of sacrifice for what feels like authentic friendship for Ava?

It’s one thing to make these kinds of choices for myself, and another thing to watch my child suffer through them. William is quite naturally adept at this. He genuinely doesn’t care if someone wants to be his friend or not. He decides for himself who his friends are (it’s a small number of people) and doesn’t feel obligated to extend friendship to everyone. Part of this might be that he is a boy. Or it could be his introverted personality, where he’s just as happy to be alone as with peers.

But Ava is different. She’s extroverted, socially aware of how she fits into any particular group, and she’s in middle school, a place where belonging can be be a blood sport. I love that she feels ready to make certain decisions about her social life and is willing to accept the consequences of these choices. I think my fear enters in when I start worrying about how other people might perceive her if she stands up for herself when it comes to defining her friends.

I’ve lived through these friend choices and felt the pain of being labelled disloyal, cruel and full of myself. Over time, however, the anger fades away, along with the shame, and I’m left with a tighter, more intimate handful of friends whom I can trust. I had to prune away the negative in order to make room for the positive to grow and flourish. And my life is richer for it.

I want this for Ava, but I have to make my way through my own reservations and private anxieties to get there. It’s one thing to endure scorn and derision from others for yourself, and another to help your child through the same thing. When I talked to a friend about this, wondering aloud if Ava should stay quiet and not risk offending this girl or her entire circle of friends, my friend said, “It sounds like a leadership quality to not need a huge group of friends. Just one or two that you can really count on.”

This helped to soothe my fears for Ava. Perhaps kindness and authenticity can be reasonable bedfellows after all, but it comes down to listening to our intuition. When we feel like we’ve had enough, and we aren’t willing to endure a difficult situation a moment longer, then we honour our authentic self by communicating this with as much kindness as possible. Until that point, we watch and we wait, holding our tongue, which is also a form of kindness and generosity.

At the end of the day, it’s critically important to know that we all have choices. We are not stuck in painful situations. We must do what we believe to be right for us, and then learn to live with the consequences of our decisions.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Writing

Waiting it Out

Julianne HarveyAugust 11, 2015August 10, 2015Leave a comment

Going on vacation is like a reset button for me. This summer has been strange up to this point: disjointed, off-kilter and emotional. I have felt like a fish out of water with no logical reason for this out-of-step sensation.

Then I went away. I had high hopes of learning something profound or life-altering, as has occurred in the past, but instead it was just more of the same. Scratchy on the inside, easily irritated, a rising wind of discontent pushing my peace out of reach.

We all have crappy seasons that we just have to walk through, whether we want to or not. I find them easier to bear when I can pinpoint the cause of my malaise (“Oh, that’s why!”), but this time around no source for my frustration made itself evident.

When the time approached to head home, I felt disappointed that no great revelation had descended. Like most people, I wanted to feel happy and relaxed; to embrace the summer heat with its long days and pleasant evenings. I yearned to flip a switch and feel like myself again, but nothing was working.

Then we came home. Suddenly, a heaviness lifted and I knew a shift had taken place. I still couldn’t identify a reason for this change, but somehow it ceased to matter. Our inner landscape is a tumultuous place. We can’t hold onto the good and avoid the bad. We must accept what comes, learning from what is unsettling as much as from the things that bring us joy.

I long to be patient with my own humanity. I want to extend mercy for my flailing vulnerabilities instead of hurrying my soul through its inevitable rough patches. And yet I fail miserably at this. I want to assign a scientific meaning to everything I feel, like pencil points on graph paper, instead of accepting that feeling blue is part of the human condition.

We can’t be skilled at everything. There is always more to learn and to achieve. Perhaps, for today, it is enough to simply rest in my own soul, without forcing any one specific outcome. I know from experience that a painful season leads to a fertile, peaceful one. Hurrying growth along breeds nothing but resentment. Patience is a better plan. Too bad it’s so damn hard.

We are all doing better than we think we are. I tend to make it harder than it has to be. Sometimes, we just have to wait it out, finding the good and the beautiful in the midst of the difficult. Answers come to us later, when we stop fighting the power of the current and find ourselves back out on the sand. Labour is agonizing for a reason. At the end of it, you get new life.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Spiritual Life

Finding Stillness

Julianne HarveyAugust 4, 2015August 4, 2015Leave a comment

Learning to be still is a skill. It’s not something we can think ourselves into. Stillness is a state to be experienced, felt, lived. It’s a choice. No matter how chaotic the world is around us, we get to control what happens inside of us. And stillness is a decision.

Our culture doesn’t really support stillness. With technology, we speed up instead of slowing down. It feels like we go against the grain when we work at a quiet interior space. But it’s so healthy for the soul. It’s similar to cleaning a clogged and dirty filter so that everything functions again the way it is meant to.

Meditation is a part of stillness, but I find it challenging. I love it when I’m doing it, but it seems to get pushed aside in favour of other things. A friend just shared a meditation app she uses called Headspace. I’m planning to give it a try to see how it works.

Getting to a place of stillness requires concentration and effort. If it’s not a priority, it won’t happen. Breathing is an excellent path to inner calm. The more we can slow down each individual breath, the better our physiological response will be. Long, deep, relaxing breaths recalibrate our inner rhythms, helping us return to our true selves.

We are so much more than our schedules, our anxieties, our regrets about the past or our fears for the future. We are now, we are here, we belong to this moment only. It’s far too easy to miss this ideal present. We can be pulled in so many directions at once, feeling fragmented and lost, but the task at hand is to gently return to where we actually are.

I know I’m on the wrong track when the squirrels get running in my mind and I forget to anchor to here. This moment is the one that matters. Other people and specific circumstances can churn and stress and grind ahead, but I can choose to slow down and search for stillness inside of myself.

I know that the benefits of this are well worth the cost, but yet I wait too long to get intentional about serenity and peace. It’s an area for me to grow into. I believe that when we move toward stillness for ourselves, other people sense it and benefit from this radiated calm. It offers permission for them to slow down and move in the direction of stillness.

I want more of this quiet. More of GOD (either a higher power or simply Good Orderly Direction). More of the certainty that I am enough, that I have enough, and that in this present moment, I lack for nothing. Worrying is a dead end street. Stillness is a healthier choice. Inching toward it is preferable to not recognizing it at all.

In Identity, Parenting, Spiritual Life

Perfect Peace

Julianne HarveyJuly 28, 2015July 28, 2015Leave a comment

My relationship with my dad was thorny, messy and difficult. It didn’t start out healthy and then deteriorate, nor did it flounder initially and then improve later. It was simply a brewing storm from the day I was born until the day he died halfway through my twenty-ninth year of life.

He’s been dead for thirteen years now. This May, I went to a friend’s house for a workshop on intuition. At the end of this perspective-shifting day, we did a group meditation where my dad appeared beside me. He handed me a note that read, “I’m sorry.”

Those words did not pass between us when he was alive, at least not in any meaningful way, but to hear them in that meditative setting seemed entirely right. They sewed up a wound that needed attention since I was a very young girl. In that quiet, contemplative place, something special, healing and transformative occurred for me.

I came home from the workshop and allowed myself time to let it settle. Soul work has its own rhythm and schedule. Thirteen years is nothing when it pertains to the soul. When we are ready, healing comes to us, with no amount of cajoling, forcing or urging on our part. I didn’t know it when I walked into that workshop, but I was now in a place to reconcile with my bipolar, alcoholic, lost father. And he was ready to return to me.

In one of his final letters to me, a few years before he died, he said that he would like his tombstone to read Perfect Peace. This request seemed at odds with his turbulent life, but I’ve come to see that my dad never stopped searching for peace. It may have eluded him while he was alive, but a part of me feels at rest when I dream about him finding it at long last through death.

It’s always bothered me that there is no physical marker anywhere of my dad’s life and death. In the last few years, I have come to understand that most of my core character attributes passed to me directly from my dad. It was hard for me to claim these while he was alive, but now, with a daily reminder in the form of my son, I see evidence of my dad’s DNA in me and around me. And I feel so grateful.

The older I get, the less I demand of myself or of others. We are all doing the best that we can, on any given day. I think it would be quite different if I could sit down with my dad today and have a conversation. After my profound experience at the intuition workshop, I wanted to give something back to my father; to show that his time here on earth was valuable and important. It mattered. He mattered.

Because of him, I am who I am, and those same character qualities exist in William. We are a chain of DNA, stretching out into the future, and I wanted to say to dad, “Look at what you have done. I love you, I have no more hard feelings, and I think you would be proud of me, my husband and my kids.”

I ordered him a bench plaque and chose a picturesque spot in our hometown that holds special meaning for both of us. It was a healing experience to visit the bench with Jason and the kids on a beautiful summer day. I cried when I thought about dad, in that beautiful spot, and I experienced the perfect peace he spent his whole life pursuing.

In Identity, Parenting, Personal Growth

Unicorn Expectations

Julianne HarveyJuly 21, 2015July 20, 2015Leave a comment

I’ve had a rough start to my summer. I couldn’t seem to figure out why I was feeling so tightly wound, irritated and falling behind until I had a conversation with a friend about it.

“Like most moms, I get so tired in June and just attempt to limp over the finish line,” I heard myself saying. “As each commitment wraps up, like music lessons or board meetings or school events, I heave a sigh of relief and think, ‘now I’m done and won’t have any more stress for the next two months.'”

As soon as these words left my mouth, I started to laugh. How ridiculous is that? But it was a revelation about my own secretive messed-up thinking – the kind that lurks in the basement of my psyche and trips me up again and again.

“An expectation is a premeditated resentment.” I love this wise tidbit from the recovery movement. When we establish a set of expectations, especially impossible ones like having a pollyanna summer where everything comes up unicorns and rainbows, we are ensuring defeat before we even get going.

I’d like to think I know this by now. Magical thinking is a hallmark of growing up in an alcoholic home. It was sewn into my DNA along with good manners and a raging inferiority complex. I have trouble shaking this iron-clad belief that some future “there” is easier/better/happier than this present “here”.

I know with certainty that “the grass is greener” is the road to doom. It doesn’t work. It’s never worked, and yet I fall for its seductive charm time and again, like the badass in the leather jacket who catches your eye in spite of your many and reasonable misgivings.

Falling into magical thinking is a child’s response to a set of very adult circumstances. Unicorn expectations are not compatible with a vibrant, healthy, responsible life. When we want everything to be clear-cut and easy, and it’s anything but, we are pissed off and disillusioned before our foot even leaves the starting block.

I”m really grateful for the conversation I had with my friend. It opened my eyes to why I have spent the last two weeks sullen and resentful. Real life doesn’t match up to fairy-tale expectations. It’s better to expect some bumps and roadblocks than to assume it will be smooth sailing because the calendar turns to July.

Showing all posts by Julianne Harvey

Reconciling Kindness with Authenticity

Waiting it Out

Finding Stillness

Perfect Peace

Unicorn Expectations