hospital Archives - Julianne Harvey

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Navigating Transition

Julianne HarveySeptember 27, 2016Leave a comment

Do you ever feel like you are swimming and swimming but you aren’t actually gaining any distance? You are simply treading water. Not drowning, so that’s positive, but not exactly setting any performance records.

What is this damn obsession I have with being impressive? Why isn’t it enough to do the best I can in my own small world for those I love without seeking a grandiose level of some invisible acclaim which probably wouldn’t make a bit of difference to me even if I did receive it?

I long to pull back the focus of my life, to go from wide lens to a smaller, more pointed perspective. When I was in the hospital last month it became easy to see what really mattered. I made a set of decisions then to let go of the stupid, piddly shit that hangs me up on the regular.

But now life is back to normal and those niggling insecurities are creeping back. I am aware of them, which is a healthy sign, but I hate wasting any energy on them when I feel like I settled this issue while at my worst in an uncomfortable hospital bed.

As a family, we are in the midst of of big life transition as we move from one province to another. It’s messy, uncertain, wonderful and frustrating as hell. For the most part, the kids have both excelled, managing a ton of upheaval with grace and good humour.

I’ve done well too, provided I don’t creep the performance bar ever higher for myself. When that starts to happen, I’m sunk. Gentleness is the key here. The goal is to enjoy life. To laugh and to build in time to rest. To work, steadily and slowly, without expecting fireworks every day. To show up. To be patient.

Transition is challenging. It requires a lot from us. Managing my own expectations is a full-time endeavour. I have to remember that I’m likely doing better than I think I am. It’s not as fucking difficult as I make it out to be.

So we continue. One foot in front of the other. The sun sets and rises the next morning, offering us yet another chance to learn what we can from the unique journey we are on. Process takes a lot of time. The seeds don’t bloom unless they are tended, and flowers never appear overnight. We have no choice but to struggle through the hard times to make it to the easier ones.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Uncategorized

Clarifying Priorities

Julianne HarveyAugust 16, 2016August 16, 2016Leave a comment

It takes hard times for many of us to clarify our priorities. When life is smooth and easy, we become complacent, bored, discontented. We get restless and little things crop up to irritate and annoy us.

But then we face a crisis or a tragedy and everything around us looks different. We are changed, from the inside out, and what mattered to us days or weeks before can suddenly shift and settle into a new form.

This has happened to me with my recent hospital stay and my slow recovery. I see now that I had a desperate need to slow down within myself; to learn how to rest and simply be instead of fretting about achieving. I had to practice allowing myself to be loved and cared for, not because I was proving that I deserved that affection, but just because it sprang from the depths of another’s soul. I had to remove myself from my own performance in order to see that I was loved even laying in a hospital bed with a tube in my throat, unable to talk or impress anyone.

Getting home and recovering, inch by painful inch, day after day, I understand now what it means to be patient. How healing it is to turn my life setting to low instead of high. How much I notice when I am resting instead of running. The details of life become sharp and crisp, instead of blurry and distant.

I am changed. I can finally see what’s important and what isn’t important. Proving, striving, yearning…all a waste of precious time and energy. Being present, grateful, authentic…these things have staying power. They sustain, enrich, nourish. I have gifts to give to myself and to others. I will not minimize these any longer. They matter. I matter. Those I love and cherish matter.

Pain is truly a marvellous teacher. None of us would throw up our hand to volunteer to struggle, to weep, to be shoehorned into surrender. But yet it gives us a chance to re-evaluate what we are doing with our time, energy and money. It offers us a unique window into our motives, our deepest fears, our unsatisfied yearnings. Our unexamined beliefs about who we are and what we are doing in this world.

Like spring cleaning, our souls need refreshing from time to time. Usually circumstances will create this opportunity for us, whether we like it or not. It could be surgery, or the loss of someone close to us, financial troubles, behavioural concerns or a host of other unforeseen situations. They offer us a mirror, into our truest selves, which we can choose to examine or ignore.

My priorities look radically different now. I’m grateful for this, even though I never would’ve chosen the path that brought me to this place. But we all must play the hand we are dealt. This internal work is for a lifetime, with endless journeys to undertake and truths to understand. I know who I am now, on a deeper level, and there are no shortcuts to arrive at this type of meaningful significance that has the power to shift an entire life to a new level.

In Identity, Minimalism, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Laser Focus

Julianne HarveyAugust 12, 2016Leave a comment

An interesting thing has happened since my appendix ruptured two weeks ago: I’ve developed laser focus. Before I got so sick and spent a week in the hospital recovering from post-surgery complications, I would look at my life with a long-range lens; fretting over this or that and always planning way out into the future.

Laying in a hospital bed alone changes all that. You are poked and prodded at all hours of the day and night. You fight for your very dignity as a human being, grateful beyond measure for the kindness of specific nurses and doctors. Your illusions of control melt away, water under the bridge of your own failing competence.

I learned in the hospital to take my recovery minute by minute. I’m not throwing up violently at this second? That’s a win. Five days of an awful NG tube, rubbing my throat and nose raw and meaning I can’t eat or drink until every vile, trapped thing in my stomach is vacuumed out so my nausea abates? The morning the doctors finally say it can be removed, I cry with the kind of joy I thought was only reserved for my wedding day or the births of my two children.

Life is chock full of wins and losses. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses. In these last two weeks, arguably the most challenging of my life so far, my line of vision has become intensely small. Focused and specific, instead of generalized and broad.

When you don’t eat or drink for 7 days, that first taste of apple juice is the greatest sensation on earth. That spoonful of vanilla pudding that doesn’t come immediately back up. The Arrowroot baby cookie, consumed at 2 am in the milky darkness of the acute care ward with soft snores of other patients filling the air around you, was like the finest of gourmet meals to me.

My senses are awake again. Thoughts of digestion and standing up to get more water and planning out my next snack consume my day. I don’t kiss my children while thinking about my to-do list any more. Now they are so precious, standing in front of me in their summer pajamas with their hair wet from a shower, and they deserve every ounce of my attention and focus.

How many times have I heard the saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything”? I truly didn’t understand it before, but I do now. I was a person who needed to learn to slow down, and I don’t do anything by half measures. I have been brought low by this burst appendix, the “lazy bowel” that followed surgery, then the large blood clot in my wrist from my last IV once I returned home.

Each challenge must be faced in turn. Everything else falls away. The big picture shrinks to the next hour: what I will eat, if I’m sleepy enough to have a nap, what do the kids need. I’ve learned that this is more than enough. My gratitude rises, as if on a float, to the level I allow for it. My blessings, in the form of family and friends, the ones you can really count on, become crystal clear.

The rest fades away. It truly does not matter. I am changed, from the inside out, from this hard-scrabble season of pain and struggle. I am enough for this challenge and the ones that are sure to come after it. I can endure the toughest experiences and so can you. I’m not interested in fixating on some pre-set idea of success in some far-away future anymore. What I have is this day, this moment, these people; this ballooning, expanding, growing love inside me that spreads into every corner of my small but significant world.