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In Books, Culture, Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

Release

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Most years, I tend to ease into the three words I choose to focus on. But this year, the word release has packed a real punch from the word go.

When Jason and I were in Baja, Mexico in late January, on one of the most fabulous trips I’ve ever taken because it was so chill and relaxing with just the two of us, I floated in the pool one hot afternoon and asked myself what I wanted to release. The phrase “trade fear for courage” dropped into my mind. I loved it. I decided to adopt it.

When we got home, I had trouble falling asleep one night. My conscience was whispering about lining up my values with my actions. I didn’t know what this meant at first, but when I tried to quiet down my busy mind I realised that Substack was not a social media platform I wanted to be associated with due to the increased press about the money they earn from far-right white supremacy fascist newsletters hosted on their site.

I started my Ruby Finch Books newsletter there in June 2023, followed a year later by my monthly podcast Intuitive Courage. After two-plus years, my subscriber numbers were small, but I had enjoyed the process of slowly growing those readers, listeners, and supporters. I thought about transferring my newsletter and podcast to a platform that didn’t feel so morally compromised, but then I remembered my word release.

A better question for me to ask was, “Do I need this?” At first, the answer felt like it had to be yes. I started the newsletter to let people know what Ruby Finch Books was up to, and then to try podcasting after several readers and teachers suggested I should have one. But after trading my fear for courage and deleting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify, Goodreads, and unpublishing my books for sale on Amazon, I realised just how amazing it feels to cut ties with products that don’t align with my values.

Projects begin and then end. We learn what we can while doing new things, and we meet interesting people along the way. And then we release them when they no longer serve us or we re-evaluate our focus. Perhaps that’s what this word release has really been for me: a re-alignment of who I am and where I’m going (and what I utilise to communicate these things to others).

I wrote a goodbye post on Substack and sent it to my subscribers, and then I deleted everything over there. It felt like the right thing to do. I ported my email subscribers over to my Ruby Finch Books site, where I started a page called Updates. I won’t post on a schedule, but if I have something important to communicate I can use that space. If you are interested, please subscribe there with your email.

So now I’m down to two websites: Ruby Finch Books and my author site here at julianneharvey.com. I have been posting here once a month for years now, but I’m going to stop writing to a schedule and post when I feel like I have something I want to say. I’d love it if you are willing to subscribe here with your email so you don’t miss out on any posts, as my only remaining social media is a Bluesky account.

I’m committing to rebuilding the analog world, by spending way less time on the digital version. I refuse to support evil far-right tech bro oligarchs who systematically destroyed what was initially fun about the internet to sell ads, create disinformation, and cram genAI trash down our throats in an effort to make us less intelligent and empathetic. That’s not a path I choose to walk down any longer.

The best part about releasing things is making room for something new to grow in their place. After release, my next word for 2026 is imagine, and I’ve already spent some time imagining Ruby Finch Pictures into being. I’m committed to finishing the screenplay for Jamesy Harper’s Big Break, working a little on that every day, along with completing my murder mystery novel A Body at the Fair. I’m writing a political journal, responding to the daily nightmare onslaught of the current news cycle. And I’m doing two new things that scare me this year: training as a hospice volunteer, and working out three times a week at fitness classes with other women in my neighbourhood.

It all starts with releasing the things that have run their course. Thank you, for reading this and for being here as a support for me in my writing and publishing journey. Each email subscriber or kind comment about my writing or speaking or teaching or nurturing means so much to me. It makes me feel less alone in this overwhelming and loud world we’re living in. Community care reminds me why it matters that we are alive right now, that we are messy humans having a messy human experience, and why nurture is important. Thank you for your care and kindness.

What are you releasing in these early months of 2026?

In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Writing

Farewell 2025

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In December, I like to take some time to look back over the year and reflect. Normally, this feels peaceful and inspiring. This year, not so much. It feels like searching through shit, hoping to find a bit of elusive gold to make the process worthwhile.

I wish the news weren’t so bleak. I find myself longing for a pre-fascist world, one where common sense, intelligence, kindness, and decency are valued again. Where generative AI is a pipe dream, not the digital asbestos we have now that infects everything and costs a fortune and makes cheating easy and weakens our human connection to art and creativity.

But there are good things, too. My kids coming home from university to spend a couple weeks under the same roof as Jason and I again, after spending this entire fall grieving for the end of the beautiful stage that was raising our family. William has a new girlfriend, so we’ve been getting to know her, and experiencing that unique phenomenon where your heart can stretch to include someone who wasn’t there before.

For 2025, I decided to not publish anything. I made it a year to focus on a new writing project, my murder mystery novel A Body at the Fair, which I hoped to finish by December. I haven’t finished, but it’s okay. One of the best things about being an independent publisher is that I can be flexible with my scheduling. I don’t have an agent asking when I’ll be turning in my book, or an imprint setting a date and holding me to that deadline.

When I watched the limited series Task this fall and did a rewatch of Mare of Easttown, by the same creator, I remembered that good work takes time. Our culture has become obsessed with speed and commerce—the endless rush to market so someone can make money. But I’d prefer to invest in work that will outlive me, that has a chance to stand the test of time, and offer hope or inspiration or meaning to others for generations to come. That type of vision takes time and intention, so I’m offering those gifts to myself.

My overall word for 2025 was space. I think I worked hard at this, trying to make space for myself in my relationships, and in the wider world. I offered myself space to simply be human, instead of rushing around trying to check items off my to-do list. I also worked at giving space to others, especially my young-adult kids. My counsellor helped me see that if days go by and I don’t hear from them, it’s not punitive like it was in my family of origin. It’s just a bit of healthy space. If and when we miss one another or need one another, we’ll reach out. This bit of important insight has literally changed my life.

My 3 words for 2025 were deeper, simpler, quieter. I wanted to slow down and catch my breath. Looking back, I can see I did exactly that. I wrote the first half of my murder mystery novel, writing using intuition like with Post Civ instead of outlining and planning, and I’m thrilled with how that book is developing. I got derailed from finishing, when America tilted precariously into white Christian nationalist authoritarian rule and I decided to process my feelings on this by writing a journal as a historical record, but I will return to it in 2026 and eventually finish the book.

I loved having my monthly Ruby Finch Books Substack newsletter and podcast to reflect on each of the words I had chosen. At different points of the year, it’s helpful to have a unique focus to live into. I plan to continue my commitment to living a uniquely human life that prioritizes depth, simplicity, and quiet. These are valuable qualities.

The farther I move away from social media, and the aggressive disinformation campaigns forced on us through open AI, designed to fracture society and spread intentional propaganda, the more human I can become. And I fucking love being human in this misguided and inevitably doomed age of artificial intelligence. What an act of resistance it is to simply lean into my messy flesh and blood existence.

I’m sad that I didn’t finish my screenplay for Jamesy Harper’s Big Break this year, nor did I set up Ruby Finch Pictures as a production company. But there’s time. I’m giving myself space, and an extra measure of compassion, and moving these goals into the next year or even 2027. There’s no shortage of interesting work to do, and I keep reminding myself that a dream I’ve had since I was sixteen can wait another year or more. Living now, through these moments, matters too.

Farewell, 2025. You’ve been a hard one. Maybe 2026 will offer a little more light and hope for my fellow human beings, as we continue to share this one and only precious planet of ours. May love, nurture, and reason become fashionable again next year. Let’s work together to make it so.

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Writing

Privacy is Valuable

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I did something this month that I once thought I’d never be able to do: I deleted my Facebook account. I tried to delete it earlier this fall, then caved and reinstated it. Not because I missed it, but because I worried about not notifying the two-hundred-plus people who had liked my writing page and been with me since the beginning of my return to writing in 2010.

Worrying about telling people on Facebook was silly, but I still panicked about the length of time it took to build up those readers and cheerleaders, only to hit the delete button fifteen years later and walk away. Facebook used to be a fun and fast way to stay in touch with people. Real, human people. Remember at the beginning, when there were no ads or sponsored content and the only thing you saw in your feed were posts from actual friends and family members?

Somewhere along the line, Zuckerberg and others monetised the whole place. They offered it to us for free, which seemed like a bargain, until we eventually realised that if there’s no fee, we ourselves are the product. I got tired of being sold to, day in and day out, and consuming posts I had no interest in seeing. I became weary of volunteering to be a product for a bored and immoral billionaire. So I pulled the plug.

My privacy is valuable. So is yours. For so long, I fell into the trap Zuckerberg et al had set for me: that I would be missing out if I wasn’t on their social media platforms. Long after it ceased to do what it initially promised (connect me to my loved ones near and far), I continued to log on, worried about being left out or left behind.

But now, a few weeks after I actually deleted my account, I feel so much freedom. And joy. It felt so damn great that I deleted LinkedIn. Now I’m left with my two websites, this one and Ruby Finch Books, plus Bluesky and Substack where I host my monthly newsletter and podcast. That’s it. I deleted Instagram earlier this year, and now I’m reading more, writing more, staring out the window more.

I reached out to a few friends to be sure they had my cell number before I pulled the plug on all social media other than Bluesky and Substack, and I’ve been setting up some actual phone calls with friends to catch up like it’s 1992 again. Much more real than hitting “like” on an infrequent status update. Easing back into a mostly analog world feels like such a good idea to me in 2025.

It’s an act of resistance, against the billionaires who mistakenly believe that human beings long for AI trash to replace human creativity. These morally bankrupt guys offered us shitty less-than versions of everything: connection, relationships, shopping, entertainment, a cure for loneliness. It took me fifteen years, but better late than never to recognise that I’d been conned.

The real world offers me so much more. It’s rich with texture. Nature is where we find true inspiration and beauty. Sunsets and ocean waves and birds calling to each other in the trees. Recapturing time offline feels like coming back to myself. Unlike the internet and AI, the physical experience is housed in a body, not free-floating somewhere unattached to anyone or anything. One is real. Embodied. The other is simply an idea, one ripe for exploitation and designed as a rip-off of the real, human entity it’s based on.

I know I’m not the first person to have these thoughts about privacy, recapturing our time, and deleting social media which has become corrupted and destroyed by billionaire oligarchs. This is a big cultural theme at the moment. But I know for sure that privacy has value. So does our human experience, as messy and unpredictable as it’s always been. Right now, I’m loving the choice to live more wholeheartedly in the analog world, instead of the digital one that looks shiny and inviting but has instead proved itself to be hollow and unsatisfying.

In Culture, Identity, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Travel

Sacrifice Costs Us

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

My husband earned his President’s Club trip this year, an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii. When he won this award two other times, when the kids were younger, I went with him. But this year, I chose not to, as a protest against the human rights atrocities and power abuses happening in that country.

It was one thing to make this decision before he left. It was another thing to hold onto my convictions and principles when he was actually there, in the humid air of Kauai, having a luxury experience that I chose not to be a part of. Jason felt strange being on his own, with no spouse (and he said he really missed me). He understood my reasons for not attending, and he was supportive, but it still cost both of us something.

When he sent pictures of the palm trees in the breeze, the Pacific Ocean, the nightly gifts, fruity tropical drinks, sea turtles, and the azure water of the winding lazy river, I felt the sacrifice I had made deep in my bones. I still believed in why I had refused to go, but I had to spend some time reckoning with what it costs us to make sacrifices.

I’m concerned that in our uber-convenient world—with overnight deliveries, food coming to our homes thirty minutes after we’ve ordered it, and social media marketing promising us that we can have anything we want, whenever we want it, with a minimum amount of inconvenience or fuss—we seem to have excised most forms of sacrifice from our lives.

I talked to my new counsellor about this. I said, “I’m proud of myself for making this hard decision not to go on the free trip. Jason didn’t have a choice. He works for a company based in the US, but I don’t. I have a choice, and I refuse to set foot on American soil until democracy and empathy are in place. But I still feel sad, for both of us, that I’m not there with him.”

She reminded me that of course I would have mixed feelings. That it’s healthy to miss him and to feel sad that I wasn’t there, but also to be proud that I took this moral stand. I can’t push others to take it with me, but I can take it for myself. All of these things can be true at once, and at the heart of these complicated feelings sits the price we pay for sacrifice.

I think I wanted it to be easier. In general, our internet-based lives have become so convenient that I tend to forget that a large part of the human experience involves pain and loss. Making a sacrifice is supposed to cost us something. It has a pinch of hurt baked right in. We find meaning where there’s a cost to be paid. When it’s free, and easy, and we have to give up nothing at all that matters to us, we aren’t sacrificing anything.

I do know that my small stand in not accepting a free trip to Hawaii is not going to move the needle politically. It’s not likely to do anything at all. But it matters to me. I needed to feel this pinch, this personal cost, to remember that many, many other people don’t have it easy at all. They are terrified, of being grabbed off the street, zip-tied, ripped away from their children, and imprisoned in horrendous conditions with no due process.

People are starving in Palestine and being bombed daily with no access to clean water or medicine. And in Ukraine, where their courageous refusal to bend the knee to a ruthless dictator has led to a war dragging on for years with an incredibly high price tag of sacrifice for so many Ukrainians.

There comes a time when each one of us has to draw a line that we simply cannot cross and live with ourselves. Lately, I’m disgusted by my own cowardice. I look to those who were captured on the Global Sumud Flotilla and I feel ashamed. I want to do more, to feel the pain of the sacrifice, to say NO MORE to this capitalist greed and mindless destruction of our planet and our resources and our compassion so billionaires can become richer and more powerful.

We all have to start where we are. To do what we can. To remember that sacrifice is supposed to cost us. Nothing worth achieving in life is free. It hurts, and these political systems that have become so evil and powerful and unfair will have to collapse and then be rebuilt, which will mean a lot of sacrifice for a lot of people. I’m practicing that now, holding it in my hands to see what it feels like.

I’m crying my tears when they come, and trying to keep my anguished heart open. I’m looking for more ways to speak up, to be involved, to believe that ordinary people have to be the ones to heal this mess and be brave enough to imagine a better future together. It will hurt, and it will cost us, and we must hold true to what we believe and who we are at our core. Otherwise the evil will win, and that’s not a situation I can countenance.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

A Dormant Season

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In my workshops at teachers’ conferences, libraries and for writers, I often speak about building in a dormant season for creativity and rest. A period of time where we are intentional about doing nothing, so we can replenish our spent energies and allow our creative impulses to regenerate.

This sounds wonderful in theory, but I realised recently how difficult I find a dormant season in practice. When I’m writing a new manuscript, I try to maintain a steady rhythm, where I work for a little bit each day so I don’t get too far away from the characters and the story. But sometimes dormancy is forced upon us, due to vacations or the needs of others or health concerns or simply life being life, and interrupting us from our best-laid plans.

This happened to me in August. And I struggled against it. I find it frustrating that even when I’m teaching about certain skills and strategies, like taking a dormant season, I can still be ridiculously slow to recognise it in my own existence. We had a couple of trips planned, and then an unplanned trip to the island late in the month to help our kids move into their first basement suite off campus for the upcoming university year, and by early September I recognised how far away I felt from the novel I was writing.

I wish I could say that I was calm about this. But I wasn’t. I got pissed off, at myself for not progressing on my book when I had planned to write all summer, and then irritated by my family members who kept me from writing. I didn’t enjoy how this resentment made me feel, but I stewed in it for more than a week before suddenly remembering what I tell others: for a dormant season to be effective, we have to surrender to it. To enjoy our lives without feeling guilty that we aren’t working on a creative project.

I had completely missed this part of the process. So I reached for my journal, and reflected on this season of dormancy I’d been in, and why I felt myself longing to get back into the writing of my murder mystery novel. I remembered my Ruby Finch Books tagline: Intuitive Courage. Somewhere along the line, I had once again lost myself and my sense of identity and purpose. I’d been at the mercy of circumstances and other people and life itself without recognising or claiming my own agency.

It felt so good to realise that I can always choose my response. I could be angry about not writing, or I could acknowledge that I had been in a period of creative dormancy, which meant that a new burst of creative energy could bloom in me if I allowed it to. In the four seasons of nature, winter is the dormant season. It’s followed by spring, the explosion of growth and vitality, but we only get the beauty of spring because the trees have been dormant in the winter.

I truly believe that the same seasons are necessary in our own lives. And sure enough, once I stopped having a temper tantrum about my writing rhythms and progress being disrupted for a month, I began to feel the slow, gathering momentum of fresh insight for my book. I would lay in bed at night, ready to drop off to sleep, and my intuition would connect one storyline with another in a way I hadn’t considered before. I would realise something in one of my character’s backstories that informed their current choices and motivations.

Writers live for those moments of insight. I suppose I’ll never know if I would’ve had them anyway, if I’d been writing during August and into early September, but they came to me so insistently and yet gently when I wasn’t writing, so I have to hope the brief dormant season made a difference. Now I’m back into the story, writing nearly every day, and the work has a fresh energy behind it.

I’m working with a new counsellor this month, and one of our goals is to help me identify these patterns in my life faster. I don’t like to feel lost and annoyed for weeks on end when I could simply choose a better response. Believing that a dormant season will help my creativity flourish is a healthier choice to make than stewing in frustration about being unproductive.

What are some ways you’ve seen a dormant season lead to fresh insights and replenished energy in your life?