Showing all posts tagged resentment

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?

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

It’s Never About the Cat Food

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Jason had a long and busy season of work travel this spring, where he was away from home for nearly a full month. In between one of these week-long work trips, he flew home for three days before leaving again. On the Friday he was home, I said, “I could use your help refilling this bag of cat food from the huge bag upstairs as it’s easier to pour it with two people than for me to scoop it on my own.”

He said, “No problem,” but by Sunday night, the small bag still hadn’t been refilled. We were in the kitchen, getting ready to go upstairs to bed, and I sighed. “I guess I’ll be filling that bag of cat food on my own, because it’s the end of the weekend and you’ll be flying out again tomorrow.”

He went upstairs. I was a few minutes behind him, as I saw a text from my daughter that I wanted to respond to. While I was answering a couple of her questions on my phone, I could hear the noisy sounds of Jason scooping out dry kibble from one bag into another. By the time I climbed the stairs, I saw that he had placed the refilled bag onto my pillow.

I was mad. So was he. And this fight wasn’t about the cat food. It’s never about the cat food.

If you’ve been married for a long time, nearly three decades in our case, you begin to recognise the trigger points that exist between you. When I stated that I’d be filling the bag of cat food on my own, he heard it as an attack on him. He was stressed, and tired, and what could’ve been a calm discussion between us quickly escalated into a war.

The next day, as I drove him to the airport, I found myself crying. I told him that he hurt my feelings with the way he refilled the bag and left it on my pillow. He said that I had been passive aggressive with my tone, and that I didn’t ask him directly to do the job.

I realised that when I said I’d be doing the job on my own, what I was really saying was that I wish he didn’t have to leave again. That I felt raw and vulnerable, offering support to my kids and to him and longing for some of that support to come back to me. I want to be able to rely on my husband for help, as we are in a new phase of a long relationship where I’m improving at receiving care from him and he’s improving at giving more emotional nurture to me.

He cannot be expected to get all of that from, “I guess I’ll be filling that bag of cat food on my own.” But sometimes we say that instead of the really true thing, because what I felt was so much bigger and harder to admit. Telling someone we rely on them and we will miss them is a tender thing to say out loud, especially when I used to be skilled at pretending to be fine all the time, even when I was actually lonely and sad and lost.

He listened to me pour out my heart on that drive to the airport, and he apologised. He still had to get on a plane and leave for a week, but I felt lighter knowing that I hadn’t abandoned myself during this argument. I took the time to ask myself what was really going on here, and felt curious about why I was so sad and wounded by his actions.

I feel like I’m in a new phase of growth right now, where I’m committed to advocating for myself, even when I feel pressured to return to old, familiar, comfortable patterns in my relationships. I didn’t use to ask for help. I wore my ability to “do it all” as a badge of honour, while privately nursing my growing resentments toward my loved ones. I don’t want to do that anymore.

This new way is vulnerable. It requires me to admit that I need other people, and it means I’m responsible to initiate the hard conversation when I’ve been hurt. But now, Jason and I have discovered a new shorthand to represent the old relationship patterns compared to the healthier ones we are creating: It’s never about the cat food.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Learning to Receive

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Every year, I pick 3 words to focus on. For 2024, those words are savour, intentional, and receive. When I picked these words in January, I had a sense that receive would be the hardest challenge for me. And it has been.

But I’m getting there. I’m learning, ever so slowly, that giving and receiving is a dance. For so many years, I was spinning in circles on the dance floor of my relationships, giving and giving and giving and not believing that I deserved to receive from those who loved me.

It’s different now. And better. More balanced and fair. When Jason and I were going to marriage counselling last spring for the first time in our nearly 27-year-relationship, I said to him, “I want a wife to care for me the way I look after you.”

At first, he had no idea what I was saying. It took us both a long time to figure out that I had been so skilled at nurturing him, while simultaneously blocking any attempt he made to be loving and caring back to me. I created a pattern in our marriage where I gave and he received. Over time, this centred his needs and interests over mine.

I was resentful about this. And angry. Our relationship felt lopsided and unfair, and the worst thing was that Jason couldn’t understand why I would be feeling unhappy.

So much of our lives is invisible to us, because we create habits around our patterns. Then we behave instinctively around those patterns, until the inner workings of the relationship dynamics are mysterious to us, even though we were the ones who set those patterns up in the first place.

But 27 years is a long time. He couldn’t see that he was the centre of our relationship, and I couldn’t see that I had been the one to put him there. We were both so lost in trying to reach each other during that painful and isolating time in our marriage.

Until we took a road trip last spring from BC to Alberta, and talked with no distractions for hours on end. Suddenly, we both found clarity on a few of these key issues. He began to understand what I was asking for from him, and I could finally glimpse the inner workings of my inability to receive the care and nurture he had been offering to me.

We both started to change on that trip last June. And now, it’s more than a year later, and I’ve been learning how to receive the care I’ve been longing for. From Jason, from my grown kids, from my close friends. Even from my beloved cat, Teddy. I opened the door that I had closed in order to protect myself from being hurt or let down by others. I started to trust again, and it’s been a beautiful thing.

In my monthly zoom nurture sessions for writers, I’m amazed at how often this issue of giving vs. receiving is coming up. So many women are conditioned to give and not to receive. Sometimes it’s an issue of self-worth and protection, like it was for me, and other times it’s tied to a feeling of obligation, like nurture is a debt we owe to someone else.

I know there is a lot more to discover on this topic. I’m just scratching the surface of understanding how complex and nuanced giving and receiving can be, especially between women and men. I’m so grateful that Jason and I can both see the inner workings a little bit clearer within our marriage, which means we can talk about it openly and make small changes to be sure we are both feeling loved and loving within our relationship.

It’s been a revelation to me, how much stronger and more generous I feel when I practice receiving that love and care from others.

In Books, Identity, Movies/TV, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth

Talking is not Trying

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Talking is not Trying

I finally watched The Glass Castle and burst into tears when Jeannette says to her dad, “Talking is not trying.” It struck so close to home that something primal in me rose up to meet this simple piece of dialogue. The whole exchange vibrated with truth.

My dad died sixteen years ago this spring. I was twenty-nine. It seems so long ago now, and in other ways it still feels fresh and recent. Like Jeannette’s father in The Glass Castle, mine was an alcoholic. He also struggled with mental illness in the form of bipolar disorder.

When dad died, he was alone, estranged from his ex-wife and his three adult children. I hung in there with him longer than my siblings, but our relationship was one hell of a wild roller coaster ride. I have no doubt that he was filled with regret at the time of his passing. He longed to be healthier and more stable, but simply couldn’t find the keys to that particular combination.

Viewing the ending of The Glass Castle, when Jeannette decides to go see her dying father, was a powerful catharsis moment for me. I recognized just how far I have come in these last sixteen years to forgive my dad and actually feel grateful for the lessons I learned through my difficult relationship with him.

I can see what he gave me, through his genes but also through his behaviour. And like Jeannette, I can agree that talking is not trying, even though I can see now that my dad did try. He just wasn’t able to succeed.

The point of the line in the movie is that talk is cheap. Action is what counts and what matters. Understanding this has changed me for the better, for I expect more than words now from those I love. It’s not enough to simply have good intentions. There has to be behaviour that matches the promises and the hype. Without the actions, all you are left with is lies. And a shit-ton of resentment.

I wish now that I could sit down with my dad over a cup of coffee and tell him that I have no more hard feelings. Forgiveness for me has been a long and exhausting road, but I can see that I have made significant progress. Talking is not trying, and when I was younger I needed much more than fancy words. I needed something that he simply was not capable of providing. And now it feels good to let that go.

But it’s still okay to admit that I needed a better dad. I think I’ll long for that until the day I die, but I’ve made peace with that desire. Now I know how to get what I need, from myself and from others who are healthy, to ensure that I can actually receive real love and care. I’ve found people whose actions do match up to their words. It’s not just talk anymore. The trying makes all the difference.