Showing all posts tagged change

In Books, Culture, Identity, Minimalism, Movies/TV, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Writing

3 Words for 2026

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Choosing words to focus on for my upcoming year is a favourite December practice for me. I find a time when I’m alone. I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and get quiet enough to listen to my intuition speak. I allow the words I want to rise to the surface of my consciousness, like something submerged in a pool that bobs up to the top.

Every year, I think maybe nothing will be there, but then, like magic, words arrive. This year, those words were: release, imagine, build. They might not be in that order when they initially appear, but when I look at the words, it’s usually easy to decide what comes first. In this case, I want to spend the first portion of 2026 releasing what doesn’t serve me, then imagine my way into new possibilities, before finishing the year by building on those dreams.

I anticipate that release will be the hardest challenge for me. I like to hold onto things. Grievances, irritations, certainties. From years of therapy and five decades of life experience, I know this isn’t a healthy pattern. Life ebbs and flows. Change is a guarantee. Month-by-month and year-by-year, we must re-evaluate what no longer works for us and choose to let some things go.

So I will practice the art of release. For a long time now, I’ve been trying to simplify everything. Minimalism has taught me that it’s better to want less than to have more. I’ve worked on being content with what I have instead of envying what other people have. This has been one of the best decisions of my life. But now, in 2026, I plan to identify and then release even more, so my life and my focus remains uncluttered. I know for sure that I can do anything but not everything, so I will make an effort to release what I no longer need to prioritise what matters most to me.

The second word, imagine, will be easier. I love to dream my way into new hopes and endeavours. I continue to long to form a production company, Ruby Finch Pictures, to turn my literary work into films and TV shows. I planned to do some of this imagining in 2025, but with my commitment to deeper, simpler, quieter this next phase of my career didn’t happen. But there’s time. I’m learning that there’s more time than I think, and slow growth is always preferable to no growth at all.

I’m also applying the word imagine to the murder mystery novel I’m aiming to finish this year, and the political journal I’ve been writing to help me process the endless nightmare of unfolding fascism and hate in our world. I think it falls to each one of us to imagine a healed society and planet. One where equality isn’t for rich or white people, but for every single person who has breath in their lungs. As human beings, we must be able to imagine something more inspiring than the current hierarchical and corporate systems we’ve been made to live under.

Then there’s the last word, build. It’s not enough simply to dream our way into things. We have to put foundations under it. We have to make peace with how slow and messy it can be to build anything that we hope will last. It never goes exactly as planned. I’m hoping to leave room in the building process to be inspired; to change my plans when something better comes along. I want to meet new people this year who might make excellent partners for me with my businesses but also just new friends to hang out with and learn from.

My overall word for 2026 is flexible. This will be a huge challenge for me, because I tend to be rigid as a coping mechanism for life. But I’m going to try to hold looser to everything and everyone. I will continue to practice receiving care and nurture from others, and remember my counsellor’s advice to DO LESS because I tend to over-function and then get resentful.

It’s a whole new year, which offers each of us a fresh chance to try again. To be gentler, with ourselves and others. To have more fun. To laugh every day. To feel afraid and do things anyway. To invest in community care the way we invest in self-care. Here’s to 2026. May it be bright, beautiful, and generous. May each one of us work to make it so.

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

Empty Nest

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In January, Jason and I will have an empty nest when our youngest child, William, heads off to university in Victoria. We are not the first family to go through this phenomenon, and we won’t be the last, but it feels like a big change and I’m trying to make space to process it.

I’ve been struggling this fall with how to parent grown-up children. It requires a loosening of the strings that have held us tightly together as a family unit. But I don’t know how to navigate this stage.

Ava came home earlier this month for a few days during fall break. I did some Christmas baking and bought some festive holiday candy and treats like I always have. I planned an outing to a favourite Belgian waffle cafe to celebrate all of us being together. But somehow it felt different this time around.

The KitKat house I gave the kids sat unopened on the table. Every other year, Ava and William unwrapped this gift and then built it together, while Christmas music played. But this Christmas season, I put the kit away in the closet and I realised that both kids have other things going on now. This childhood tradition was just that: from their childhood, and now we were in a new stage.

I found this disorienting and lonely. I felt silly for trying to keep everything as it was, when very shortly both kids will be moved out of the house and be living in dorms with other students. But there are no rules for these big life transitions. We have to figure out how to behave as the changes are unfolding. And I’ve never been particularly skilled at letting go.

I’m experimenting with not texting Ava as much while she’s at school. She’s now in her third year of her theatre degree, and she’s busy, and somehow this year feels different in our relationship compared to last year. It’s strange to nurture my kids from a distance. To love them and miss them, but actively work at letting them know that it’s healthy for them to grow away from me.

Jason seems way better at this than I am. Maybe this is because his role as a dad was always a little more emotionally distanced than mine was as the mom. So now I’m trying to learn from him. I know it’s time to step back, and to focus more on my own career and what I might need now that the day-to-day hands-on parenting stage is over.

Some days this feels like freedom, and other days it feels like a loss. Like something really good and precious is over and can never be retrieved.

To fill the void, we decided to fill our empty nest with another kitten. Meet Pippin, who joined us earlier this month, at just 8 weeks of age. He’s cuddly and adorable, and he fills me with joy.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Travel

Another Bridge to Take

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In the song “This Ain’t Goodbye” by Train, there’s a lyric that brings me to tears. Every time he sings, “Another bridge to take on the way to letting go” I think about how hard it is to release my grip when I want something to stay the same.

But as we all know, life means change. Stages and seasons and growth and pain and learning to let go, over and over and over again. I really kind of hate this. You’d think we’d get better at this as we age, but some things give me a lump at the base of my throat, and keep me awake at night, and cause me to cry when I least expect them to.

One of those things is my youngest child graduating from high school. William has his school dinner/dance this weekend, and his commencement ceremony in a few weeks. This is a big bridge to take. When Ava graduated three years ago, I thought to myself, “William is only in grade nine. There’s lots of time left with a kid at home.”

And now the day is almost here. It’s a time to celebrate all that he’s achieved, and how bright his future looks ahead of him, but as the mom and dad, it’s also a time to grieve the end of his childhood. I’m really feeling the truth of the saying, “When raising children, the days are long but the years are short.”

With all of these significant life transitions (or another bridge to take on the way to letting go), I do my best to prepare emotionally ahead of time. I really do. But there’s anticipation, and then there’s experience. The two are never the same thing, which is another thing I hate because I have no choice but to walk through it when the time comes. Advance preparation only gets me so far, and then the only way out is ever through.

Another one of these bridges I had to take this month was when Ava decided to fly to New York City on her own and stay in a shared-room hostel near Central Park. We suggested she go with a friend, but after our family Europe adventure last summer she wanted to try a solo trip. In theory, I thought this was a fabulous idea, and very brave when you are only twenty-one. In reality, I worried about her until she arrived home safely—feet sore from walking the city at all hours and full to the brim with excitement and stories and joy from managing everything on her own.

These are important foundational experiences for our children to undertake. They have to learn that the world is a big place and they can be smart and travel safely within it. But for the parents, this involves a lot of letting go. Of being there when our kids need us, but not taking over every arrangement so they have their own chance to lead and to shine. It’s exciting. And hard. It requires us to give up some semblance of control, and to lean into trusting our grown kids.

I’m taking a lot of bridges right now, with both of my kids, and I’m slowly (so slowly!) learning to let go of them. Like so many parents, I’m proud, and I’m sad, and I’m a bit lost, and I’m celebrating at exactly the same time. We never stop learning how to adjust to these changing seasons.

Happy graduation weekend to you, William! Congratulations, and we love you.

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

Hello Fall

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Last week I wrote in my Ruby Finch Books newsletter about how much I love fall, but I realised there was more to say, so I thought I’d do an update here.

Every single year, as the calendar changes from the loosy-goosy days of summer to the more structured routine of September, I feel a lift in my spirits. I know there are some people who feel joy when the temperature rises, but I’m a fall girl through and through.

The fuzzy pajamas and thick warm socks. Boots with jeans and long-sleeved shirts again. A light jacket with a pocket to hold my car keys. Using the oven to cook dinner without thinking about how hot the house will get. Survivor and The Amazing Race on Wednesday nights. School starting up, which means a quiet house, where most days I’m the only one in it besides our two cats.

William is starting grade 12, which signals the beginning of the end of children at home. It feels strange – both sad and freeing in equal measure. For the last fifteen years, we’ve done a back-to-school routine like many parents before us involving fresh school supplies, first-day outfits, new shoes, lunch kits, and posed photographs in the same spot every year, with tears from William and wide grins from Ava.

But now we are at the end of this predictable series of post-Labour-day events. Ava left home in mid-August for her two weeks of Community Leader training at UVic, where she’s starting her second year in the theatre program, and William is beginning his final year of high school. When he graduates, we will have two adult children, and be on the edge of an empty nest.

My friend Susan posted about this phenomenon on Facebook, saying that there’s so much support for new parents, and so little for those at the end of the journey. And of course it’s not the END, in any final sense, as our grown kids will continue to need us for years to come. But this transition – from parents of kids who live at home and are considered minors under the age of eighteen, to having them be grown-up adults – is a big one.

I felt melancholy about it for a few days at the end of August, but once school actually began last week, the sadness evaporated and became something suspiciously close to contentment. It feels like I’m nearing the finish line on a job I’ve done well, with a lot of highs and lows in equal measure, but I showed up and I gave what I could and now I can glimpse a future that involves Jason and me without two kids at the centre of our marriage and family life.

Around two years ago this thought scared me shitless. Some of those fears are what I’m exploring in the new book I’m writing on The Negative Space – all the things we didn’t get or cannot see that make what we do possess have meaning and value. It’s pleasant to consider coming to the end of the day-to-day responsibilities and stresses of parenthood, while recognising that this transition, like every change in life, costs us something. We give up something, and receive something different in return.

This is also the first September in 6 years that I haven’t been a university student. Like the parenting changes on the horizon, being free of student deadlines and homework and classes is both unmooring and exciting in equal measure. I’ve started a publishing imprint and I’m busy building a company, offering online writing classes, launching a YA book next month, planning the publishing of my thesis novel in 2024, and writing a new memoir. It’s exhilarating to be doing work that isn’t designed to impress professors or agents or editors, but is something I can do simply because I believe in it myself. Having this be enough is like pure oxygen. It’s invigorating and restoring.

Well, I planned to write about our 3.5 week Europe trip this summer and what I discovered about myself, but this fall post became something else. And I love that. I’ll write again about the trip, because I’m still working through how I feel and what changed for me while travelling abroad, but for now I’m leaning into my Ruby Finch Books motto – intuitive courage – and trusting that where my intuition leads is worth following.

How are you feeling this fall? Any big changes on the horizon?

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

Fall 2022 Retrospective

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I can’t believe I haven’t written a post since early September. Once my semester started, I felt like I had no time or energy to come up for air and think about anything that wasn’t my coursework or my thesis revisions. But a lot of things happened, both externally and internally, and every time I sat down to write a new post for January I lost my train of thought, so I thought I would go back and do a brief retrospective.

It took me a long time to adjust to Ava going to university. She was loving her classes, making new friends, getting fabulous grades and overall thriving in her first three months as a theatre student. I couldn’t believe how different our family seemed with one less person here. Ava’s absence made me keenly aware of the concept of negative space – noticing and appreciating what isn’t there and how it forms and shapes your experience as much as who and what is actually there.

I started to realize that without her, I felt lonely as the sole woman in a house with two males. I wrote about this, in my Creative Nonfiction grad class, but I was attempting to understand something as I was living it out, which is always a challenge. It’s better to let some time pass, so you can see the contours of the thing with more clarity. I’m slowly getting there, but the key takeaway here is that I learned to voice what I need from Jason and from William. I practiced saying, “This is not enough for me. I need more connection, more interaction, more depth of meaning in our relationships.”

Saying that was like flying for me. It was exhilarating. I felt untethered, free, unafraid to lean into the hard conversations in a way that was new and significant. I asked for and expected others to change for me, instead of me bending into awkward relational shapes for others as I’ve done for most of my life. Something about this process opened me up. It shook my systems, disrupting old patterns, making things strained for a time but ultimately helped me to change in a profound and lasting manner.

A favourite meme that I looked at while writing my thesis this summer says, “Some things break your heart but fix your vision.” That was my fall 2022. My heart cracked but then healed, and now I’m different. I also got hit by a truck (literally) in late November. I was at a dead stop at a light, when a tandem semi-trailer truck rolled back and hit me. Hard. My neck and back got all screwed up, not to mention my beautiful pristine Rav 4 which has never had a scratch on her until this collision.

Thankfully, I’m better now with some chiro, massage and physio appointments, and my vehicle will be fixed, but in the aftermath of the accident I realized something with a newfound clarity. You can do everything right, like sitting quietly in a turn lane waiting for the light to change, and still get hit. As hard as I try, I cannot see around every corner to plan for every possible scenario. I’m tired of wasting energy on that shit.

I turned 50 in December, and I feel like I’m just getting started. I’m determined to stop trying for hospital corners. It’s time to invite more emotional mess. To stop asking for permission outside of myself. I’m longing for openness, meaning, depth, fun, laughter, adventure. Being afraid and careful got me to this point. So did doing a lot of people’s inner work for them (or at least trying to). That’s over now. Some things break your heart but fix your vision, and I’m so grateful to be able to see with more clarity as I tackle a new decade of my life.