Identity Archives - Page 21 of 28

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships

Suspended Between Two Worlds

Julianne HarveyJuly 19, 2016July 18, 2016Leave a comment

Do you ever feel suspended between two worlds? It’s an uncomfortable sensation; one that stretches you and asks you to be flexible.

Going with the flow is not my strong suit, but fighting against the river’s current is a losing proposition. It seems to always come back to surrender. Acceptance, optimism, courage: elements that make our lives easier if we agree to stop fighting for the outcome we desire and just let it be.

We are quite suddenly moving to the Vancouver area because my husband has taken a new job there. “Sudden” is a tough concept for a Type A planner like myself, but my chief goal for this move is to stay calm, to proceed in an orderly manner toward the red exit sign instead of causing a panicky stampede.

I’ve experienced some success with this serenity and also some serious failure (accompanied by swearing, tears and generalized rage). We met with the realtor and the stager, then worked flat-out for four days before the appointment with the photographer. Our house went on the market less than a week after we discussed it with the realtor.

This accelerated timeline has left me breathless and off-balance. I leaned on friends for help, a spiritual practice good for my overall health, but that sensation of being between two worlds is uncomfortable and stressful. It’s a growing place; one that asks you to summon forgotten reserves of strength and grace.

The key is to refuse to give in to the fear and the “what ifs”. What if the house doesn’t sell, what if the timelines don’t match up, what if the endlessly shifting dates get too crazy and I can’t count on anything? All useless questions, driven by fear and anxiety.

Every one of us has uncertainties to face. We can either panic or remain calm. We can be paralyzed by fear or choose to trust that we are going to be okay. I keep thinking about the 2010 movie title The Kids Are All Right. I’d rather put my faith in that idea as it brings me peace.

Change is beautifully invigorating. It’s also hard and filled with unknowns. Like so much of this life, those two disparate concepts work hand-in-hand. You don’t get inspiration without risk. You don’t get love without pain. You don’t get adventure without fear.

I’m determined to take this move one task at a time. To try to remember that I cannot see the finish line from my starting position. I just have to keep moving, completing lap after lap, knowing that as I inch nearer to the end I’ll gain the experience I need to complete this particular race. And then there will be another one to suit up for and run.

All of life works this way – for me, for you, for everyone. The bitter right alongside of the sweet. The sad goodbyes and the joyous hellos. One person, with a foot in two different worlds, doing his or her best to stay calm enough to survive the challenges of each particular transition.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships

Stay the Course

Julianne HarveyJuly 12, 2016July 11, 2016Leave a comment

How we handle stress reveals us on a primal level. We have nowhere to hide when the pressure builds. Do we blow up, retreat, soothe with food, shopping, alcohol or sex, or do we face it head on with grace and calm?

Very few of us do the latter, but it’s a new goal for me. I know that the time to prepare for stress is when the seas are still, not wild with uncertainty. We prepare for hardship in the peaceful times, by developing skills that will see us through the bumps that are sure to come in the future.

Confidence is always an inside game. We are sunk if we hinge our self esteem on any outward achievement or praise, for these are fickle and will certainly fade. Our surest hedge against internal or external disaster is to stoke the fires of our belief in ourselves on a regular basis. Waiting until the stress arrives means we are too late.

I’ve been living this out lately, after a turbulent period of suffering. Those old demons that hunch on my shoulder and plague me with taunts of being less-than, not good enough and worthless have finally quieted down. I simply waited them out and in time they got bored and went on to irritate someone else.

Half of this life is just outlasting what tries to defeat us. It’s important to stay busy with other pursuits to minimize the dark forces working to pull us under.

I’m loving this season of internal calm. It’s that dewy, clean feeling after a hard rain. It’s less a triumph than a relief that this particular storm has ended and patches of blue sky are visible once again.

All I know is that it helps to do our internal work each and every day, especially when we see no obvious evidence of it. If we stay faithful to our soul, when the tough times mysteriously end we will see the benefits of this devoted attention.

If you are hurting right now, with no clear answers or insights, simply stay the course. Nourish yourself with the gentle sustaining routines. Wash your face, apply sunscreen, listen to happy music, drink water, eat your vegetables (and also chocolate). Pain doesn’t last forever. Neither does self-doubt, fear and worry. One day, you’ll wake up and feel contented, hopeful, a little bit more secure in your own brave identity.

You are likely doing better than you think you are. I say this to myself as a mantra when all seems lost. Life can be rough with many mountains to climb, but we can do it if we pack the right gear and we train for the trail so we are prepared.

Gentleness and courage are suitable bedfellows for the calm times and the terrifying ones. One day, in the very near future, you will experience a personal breakthrough. You’ll feel different, you’ll see the world in a new way, and all of that constancy in the darkness will get you to that unforeseen moment of light.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships

Help is the Sunny Side of Control

Julianne HarveyJune 28, 2016June 28, 2016Leave a comment

“No one mentioned until I was in late middle age that – horribly! – my good, helpful ideas for other grown-ups were not helpful. That my help was in fact sometimes toxic. That people needed to defend themselves from my passionate belief that I had good ideas for other people’s lives.

I did not know that help is the sunny side of control.”

This beautiful quote is from the great Anne Lamott’s Facebook page. When I read it, something vital and primal leaped to recognition in my own soul, like a light switch being turned on to illuminate a dark space.

In this life, we have to experience an idea to fully understand it. We must inhabit it by walking it out. Simply thinking through it is not enough to change us. We need to taste it, grapple with it, fight it and then eventually surrender to it.

I did not know that help is the sunny side of control. This tidy phrase encapsulates what I’ve been wrestling with for several years now. I feel like I’m finally ready to accept this bold truth: when help is mostly about me and what I want the other person to do in return, it is not actually help. It’s manipulation, expectation, control.

Learning to face ourselves honestly is a lifelong process. It’s far too horrifying to do all at once. We must take it in tiny stages, lest we be blinded by the outrageous shame of our dysfunction.

If you grew up like I did, help was not free. It was a transaction. For a people pleaser, this meant confusion and anger a lot of the time, because there were no words around this. The system was built on glances, silences, tense body language, raised voices, narrowed eyes and other not-so-subtle clues. You picked your way through this minefield, hoping not to be blown up while trying to earn love and gold stars from others by being so good and helpful that you ached from it.

I learned to control by offering help, while refusing it from others so I wouldn’t owe anyone and they would all owe me. Perhaps not so sunny, but true nonetheless.

Now I practice offering help with no strings attached. It’s new and radical. It’s also hard. I push myself to receive help, support and care from others without feeling that I must repay a silent debt. Unspooling these complex, dysfunctional behaviours is a lengthy job. I must remember that it’s okay to go slow. Many people never even try to face their unvarnished souls – it’s simply too shocking and painful.

Progress towards health is preferable to remaining in denial and darkness. I yearn for light, for beauty, for healing, for restoration. True help is freely given, not bartered for something else or held over another’s head as a ransom demand. That is control. Just because I grew up with that doesn’t mean I can’t change these patterns for my children and for the last half of my life.

I know there is a better way because I’ve seen it in action and felt its warmth on my skin. Love does not demand to be noticed. It is offered with no guarantee it will be returned. I’m going to lean in to this truth, to wear it like a coat and see where it will take me.

In Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth

Redefining Bravery

Julianne HarveyJune 21, 2016June 20, 2016Leave a comment

Last week, a friend redefined bravery to me. I was searching for the escape hatch, the red nuclear “launch” button, the excuse to reboot and start over instead of facing up to a difficult and messy situation.

She said, “Showing up when it’s hard is brave, too.” I really, really needed to hear this. When it gets dark all around us and we can no longer find our way, it’s human nature to want to flee. And sometimes, of course, this is the right course of action. But many times, the courageous act is to stay strong when the storm is blowing. To refuse to run, even though it would relieve the pressure and make things easier for a while. But there are also great lessons to be learned from staying put.

I’m so grateful to this friend, for she had the guts to give me her honest thoughts. She did not say what I hoped she would, in my moment of desperation with my bold plan to sell everything we own and go on a madcap family adventure. Instead, she listened and offered another perspective, one born from her own painful experiences with loss and growth.

Bravery takes many forms. When life is unforgivingly tough, as it often is, our courage can desert us when we need it most. This is why the community of loved ones we have invested in and built up is so critical. When we lose all perspective and a good deal of our common sense and optimism, we need people who know us and love us to talk us out of the darkness and back to the light.

Stability is no small thing. It matters, to us and to those who count on us. When we feel lost and bereft, it’s tempting to go for the rash and daring option; to shake up the status quo and let the damn chips fall where they may. In certain seasons and stages, this can be entirely appropriate and helpful to jump-start a necessary change, but at other times it’s the coward’s way.

Everything shifted for me during the course of our conversation. It was like putting on glasses so the fuzzy edges came into focus. The fever dream had passed and I could stop thinking about surviving each day and move my vision out by a year or two. Jason and I needed a fresh heart-to-heart, so we could redefine the future we committed to when we joined our lives together nearly eighteen years ago.

It all looks different again, even though nothing outwardly has changed. Life is still hard. I continue to long for something new and hopeful. Every one of us needs extra breathing space in our soul from time to time. We are birds who must summon the courage to stretch our wings and take flight. We all need each other, for support, encouragement and care.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Relationships

Preparing for Change

Julianne HarveyMay 17, 2016May 16, 2016Leave a comment

Change is a process. We can’t see it clearly peering into the future, but when we look back it’s easier to plot the high and low points on our individual graph.

I’ve come to recognize that the groundwork for change gets laid days, weeks, months and years ahead of the actual shift that we can point to and identify. Extreme patience is required in the preparation stage. It’s the seeds, deep underground, beginning to grow but nowhere near ready to burst through the soil and make themselves visible.

So much of this life is preparing. We must wait, whether we like it or not, until the time is right for the longed-for change to take place. As humans, we are wired to become bored and discontent when our existence becomes too predictable and safe. We crave adventure, change, new scenery and experiences. It’s in our DNA.

But between the desire and the reality there is a gap. Sometimes it’s short and other times it’s dishearteningly long. Most of us would not make big changes unless we first felt motivated by boredom or loss or an inner compulsion to inject fresh vitality back into our lives. It’s easy for inertia to set in, to lull us into complacency, but when the spark ignites for something new, we begin to stir up our excitement and then we usually have to wait.

I’m trying to change the way I view this preparatory period. I know that work is happening, deep in my soul, just as surely as flowers bloom out of buried seeds and not by accident. We’ve been painting our house and boy, oh boy, painting is mostly prep work. And the preparation doesn’t look like much, but without it you’d never get to those beautifully altered, crisp and clean walls.

Change is a long, messy, unpredictable process. You get great news and you’ll be flying high, then a rejection or a disappointment hits and you feel abject despair, all of that inspirational hope erased like a whiteboard. Life is a series of hurdles. Some you clear with room to spare and you are filled to the brim with success and optimism. Others you smack into and fall hard, occasionally breaking a bone or bruising your confidence, and you have no choice but to muster the courage to stand up and try for the next one.

Preparation is critical to implement change at some point in the future. We wait, we dream, we continue to work even when the odds are stacked against us. It’s better to believe that those seeds are, in fact, growing, even if we can’t see them. We show up, day after day, learning what we can and refusing to give up on what we long for most. And one day, perhaps when we least expect it, all of that prep work will turn into actual change, just in time to start the process over again with something else.