Showing all posts tagged resistance

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, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships, Spiritual Life, Uncategorized

Pick a Side

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Pick a Side

We can no longer afford to theorize about what we might have done if we’d been alive during the second World War. With the events of this past weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, the time to pick a side and stand up for what you believe is RIGHT DAMN NOW.

Recently I read an article on Twitter about the defining factor between those who helped Jewish families and those who did not. The biggest difference between the people who risked their lives to save others and those who refused was their upbringing.

The people who were raised in an authoritarian setting, with punishment looming if you didn’t obey, stood by and did nothing while others were jailed, humiliated and murdered. Those who hid people persecuted by the Nazis at great risk to their own safety did so because as children they were taught to think for themselves and to question authority.

I can’t stop thinking about that article because the evil of “us versus them” is not just in the history books. It is happening now, in 2017, and it forces each one of us to pick a side. Not with our words, because we all know talk is cheap. Now is the time to prove with our actions whether we will stand up for the rights of all people and live with a sense of inclusion and compassion.

No middle ground exists here. This isn’t about left and right, conservative and liberal, fake news and real news. No shades of grey can be found in this argument. It’s time that every one of us looks deep into our own prejudices and sense of privilege. Unless we get really honest and brave about these topics, no true healing can take place.

The right response to the images and the rhetoric from Charlottesville is rage and disgust. This is the correct moral and ethical response to symbols of hate and bigotry. But as time moves on and these feelings fade, the next step is honest, reasoned conversation about the dark depths of our own hearts. When we get honest, we can start to heal and then to rebuild. It’s time now to create a healthy, inclusive, female-led world. We can’t possibly do a worse job of it than then men who have been leading for centuries.

No more grand theories. Now is the time for action. To stand up and say “NO” to hate, racism and supremacy. Now we need to work together, with love and generosity in our hearts and our words, to bring healing to such a divided, angry and lost world. It’s always darkest before the dawn, but we must build this new dawn. To make it better and more inclusive and compassionate than anything the world has seen before.

Pick a side. Neutrality does not work here. Silence is complicit agreement with the current power structure. Resistance speaks up, no matter what the personal cost, for what is right and decent and moral. It’s our time to rise. To heal. To extend our hands to those who need our help, whose very lives are threatened by this rising tide of hatred and fear.

Our weapons are love, truth, inclusion and courage. Who is ready to stand up and be counted? To speak up for what is right and to refuse to be silent and terrified. I have chosen my side and I will use my voice. This fight is too important for anything else.

In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Relationships

Why the Women’s March Matters

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Why the Women’s March Matters

The Women’s March matters because now is the time to wake up and fight for what we all deserve: basic human rights of equality, respect and dignity. 

I floated the idea of attending the Women’s March in Vancouver on January 21st to my husband and kids in a somewhat lacklustre manner. I said, “I’d really like to attend this march because I think it’s critically important to stand up for what I believe is right, but I also want to sleep in on Saturday.”

My thirteen-year-old daughter, who is a feminist through and through, immediately responded, “I’m in. Let’s go.” My husband said the same thing. My plans to sleep in were jettisoned in favour of a momentous cultural moment. I’m so grateful for their positive response to this idea, for I needed the kick in the ass to move beyond what I say to what I’m willing to show up for and be a part of.

The time has come to stop hoping for change and to instead become that change. It’s not enough to sit by and be silent. Many women have taken that path throughout history, for a lot of different reasons, but now, in 2017, we’ve come too damn far to stay quiet now.

For the first time since the U.S. election, I felt optimistic again while I was marching. I felt powerful, like what I want is achievable if I’ve got the guts to go for it. I will not say nothing and passively watch our culture slide further to the right into an outdated and unfairly oppressive system of patriarchy.

Women and minorities are powerful when we join together and say, “No more of this. We are valuable and important and we have voices that we aren’t afraid to use.” Sure, it might make some people uncomfortable. So what? The spirit of the Women’s Marches around the globe was one of power, peace and unity. I could feel it in my bones in Vancouver. It woke something up that was too afraid to come out into the light before.

I watched Ava’s face as we walked, chanted, read signs, laughed, linked arms and participated. Her features were lit up, fierce, on fire, alive and alert. It was beautiful. I felt the surging energy of the crowd, passionate enough to show up early on a drizzly Saturday morning in the tens of thousands to say, “We are here. We matter. We will not be ignored.”

In my lifetime I’ve never seen a coordinated protest rise up around the world in response to the American inauguration of a new president. But the integrity of the man they have elected matters. The danger he poses to women, minorities, immigrants and the marginalized is very real and deeply disturbing. I’m concerned when I talk to people who don’t seem bothered by what is developing to the south of us.

I’m immensely proud to be a woman with a husband and children who were ready and willing to show up and march. The real work of resistance is only beginning, but hot damn, what a crackerjack opening we had around the globe on Saturday.

It’s not enough to wait and see what happens. We’ve been grieving and fearful for awhile now. It’s women who made this mammoth march happen in a short amount of time. We are the ones who have to show up and fight for what we believe in.

Clearly, many people are willing to do this important work. I’m encouraged by these numbers. It makes me feel less terrified and alone. Let’s keep going. We matter and we have a lot of work to do to keep this momentum going.