Showing all posts tagged goal

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Speaking, Uncategorized, University, Writing

Fallow

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I’ve just completed my final semester of undergrad. After four years of classes, I’ll graduate in early June with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Due to our never-ending super fun pandemic, instead of walking across the stage in a cap and gown as I’d planned, I’ll be mailed a box containing my degree.

I’m 48, and at times I’ve felt ancient next to my twenty-year-old classmates, but overall it’s been an excellent experience to complete the higher education I began thirty years earlier. So enjoyable, in fact, that I’ve decided I might like to teach creative writing at the university level in the future, so for that I’ll need an MFA. I applied to UBC for grad school and I’ve been accepted, attending in-person this fall for their two-year program.

Completing any big goal is satisfying, but I also feel strange. For so long I dreamed about having additional time on my hands. To have five months off with no school seemed impossible to imagine, and now it’s here. I want to rest, to daydream, to read novels for pure pleasure and not feel like I’m supposed to be doing something else. To write, for myself and not for a grade.

I just finished a round of counselling, and in my last session I talked about the need for a creative break to let the soil of my mind rest. “I think that’s called letting the land lie fallow,” she said. The more I turned this word over in my mind, the more I fell in love with it. For me, this season between April and September is designed for intentional inactivity, a state that doesn’t feel naturally comfortable. But it is necessary.

Other than a few writing projects and some conference speaking, I’m going to prioritize a fallow state for my creativity. I’ll need to go into grad school as a full-time student with a sense of renewed purpose and energy. For those things, I require rest and rejuvenation.

Our culture likes to whisper in our ear, “You’re only valuable if you produce something, earn money, and work hard all the time.” But I’ve been fighting against this messaging for quite a long time, offering myself permission to slow down, simplify my existence and clarify my priorities. My 3 words for 2021 are peace, priorities and potential. They all fit well into this season of my life, where one big goal has been completed and another one has yet to begin. I’m in the liminal space, where I’m not quite sure of anything, except that rest is required so I don’t burn out.

We’ve all had a hellish twelve months. This time last year the whole world was turned upside down by Covid, and a year later we’re still fighting to stay healthy and carve out a tiny bit of novelty and fun wherever we can. It’s a long haul on a boring treadmill of sameness. For me, right now, the answer is the word fallow, which means “land plowed and left unseeded for a season or more.”

What does the word fallow look like in your life right now?

In Identity, Movies/TV, Nurture, Personal Growth, Speaking, Writing

Going Back to University

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Going Back to University

I’m going back to university this fall to finish my undergraduate degree.

I have one and a half years of college completed, but it was A) many moons ago and B) taken in the United States so most of it won’t transfer to Canada, which essentially means that I’m going back to school to start fresh on a degree that I was partway to finishing twenty-four years ago and didn’t complete.

But it sounds better to me to say I’m going back in order to finish, as attending school part-time in my mid-forties is a daunting task. I may still get some credit from my transcripts, but even if I don’t, I’ve decided to stop waiting around to complete this life goal (or at least inch toward it).

Our biggest goals are funny entities. At times, they feel so close we can touch them, and other times they elude us and drive us mad with frustration. One day this spring I realized that I’ve been talking about going back to school for so many years and no time seemed quite right to do it.

I did return to Weekend University in Calgary in 2009 but after one course I decided to put it on hold as running a home business, working part-time at a local newspaper, writing and managing life with a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old proved too much for me. At the time I thought I’d take a break for a year or two and then return when life settled down but suddenly 8 years went by and I realized I’d done nothing to get me closer to graduating with a Bachelor of Arts.

So I’m doing it now. My writing and speaking careers are chugging along, with small, happy milestones along the way to my biggest dreams becoming realities. Ava’s acting career is moving forward and I’m busy taking her to auditions and working with her agent on submissions. I’m getting a few days work here and there as a background performer in movies and TV shows. I just formed a production company with two people and I’m screenwriting and producing short films. It’s all an incredible amount of fun and feels like the right combination of tasks for me to be doing.

Returning to university, even for one class a semester, is equal parts terrifying and exciting. When I said this to my friend Pam, she responded, “Well, Julianne, if you aren’t terrified and excited you aren’t really living life to the fullest!” This helped to encourage me, probably more than she knows.

Ava is 14 and in a few years we will be touring colleges and universities for her. I won’t be anywhere near done my degree by then but at least I’ll be plugging away at it, chipping away at this goal that fell by the wayside for a number of (mostly) valid reasons so many years ago. I want to continue to challenge myself, to prove that I can do things that are way out of my comfort zone.

I can learn. I can work hard. I can dream big. I can model what I believe through my day-to-day actions. This time around, my degree will be in Creative Writing instead of Communications. It’s been a long and winding road to find my way back to my true self and to develop the courage to grow into my biggest dreams. I’ve never been happier.

It’s time to stop talking about this particular goal and get inching toward it. Better late than never.

In Personal Growth, Relationships

Safe in the Moment

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on Leave a comment
Safe in the Moment

When I’m afraid, it helps to follow the advice I regularly give to my son William when he begins a panic attack: breathe slowly, bring yourself back to your body, stay in the present moment, repeat to yourself, “I am safe.”

Most of what worries us lives either in the future or the past. It’s fear over a potential outcome that might never materialize or regret over something already done. If we make an effort to exist in the present moment, with all of its attendant feelings, sensations and realities, we have a better chance of staying calm and collected.

The question I’m trying to ask myself is: what is under my actual control? We all know that our response to any situation is completely up to us, but practicing this while under stress is still challenging. Our minds nose way down the road, anticipating poverty, relationship conflict, uncertainty, loneliness. It’s easy to become overwhelmed.

SafeThe key is to bring my focus back to the present moment. To breathe. To imagine myself as safe, cared for, loved…as I can provide these things for myself. Prepping for doomsday scenarios only increases the chaotic sense of panic. Whatever comes, each one of us will have no choice but to deal with it.

Imagining stress is optional, facing reality is not. We are better off working to remain calm and stable, so we are in a more secure mental space to handle misfortune if it should arrive. And it helps to remember that most of what we worry about never actually happens.

Good things are just as likely to occur as horrible ones. Most of our problems originate in our minds, because we long for a specific outcome and anything other than that brings us grave disappointment and loss, even if it was only a vague possibility instead of an actual reality. Damn this internal pessimism of mine, this infernal waiting for the other shoe to drop which ruins even the happiest of days.

I should know by now that the doom and gloom I forecast usually disappears with time. If I allow a little light and air on it, I’ll watch it vaporize. Old habits like shame, depression and fear roar back into life if we let them, for they’ve worn a deep, familiar groove in our subconscious. I have healthier skills available to me, such as trust in myself and others, a newly-kindled optimism, the ability to set a long-term goal and work patiently at reaching it.

Where it all falls apart is the intersection with other people, for I cannot control what others do and say. But I am not responsible for the actions of other people. I must simply observe what they do (or fail to do) and then respond in the healthiest way I can. The stress of others does not have to become my reality. Only if I let it. I can come up with a happier strategy. The critical thing is to be clear on what’s mine and what isn’t – a lifelong struggle for me but one I have to keep working on.