Showing all posts tagged shame

In Culture, Identity, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Travel

Sacrifice Costs Us

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

My husband earned his President’s Club trip this year, an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii. When he won this award two other times, when the kids were younger, I went with him. But this year, I chose not to, as a protest against the human rights atrocities and power abuses happening in that country.

It was one thing to make this decision before he left. It was another thing to hold onto my convictions and principles when he was actually there, in the humid air of Kauai, having a luxury experience that I chose not to be a part of. Jason felt strange being on his own, with no spouse (and he said he really missed me). He understood my reasons for not attending, and he was supportive, but it still cost both of us something.

When he sent pictures of the palm trees in the breeze, the Pacific Ocean, the nightly gifts, fruity tropical drinks, sea turtles, and the azure water of the winding lazy river, I felt the sacrifice I had made deep in my bones. I still believed in why I had refused to go, but I had to spend some time reckoning with what it costs us to make sacrifices.

I’m concerned that in our uber-convenient world—with overnight deliveries, food coming to our homes thirty minutes after we’ve ordered it, and social media marketing promising us that we can have anything we want, whenever we want it, with a minimum amount of inconvenience or fuss—we seem to have excised most forms of sacrifice from our lives.

I talked to my new counsellor about this. I said, “I’m proud of myself for making this hard decision not to go on the free trip. Jason didn’t have a choice. He works for a company based in the US, but I don’t. I have a choice, and I refuse to set foot on American soil until democracy and empathy are in place. But I still feel sad, for both of us, that I’m not there with him.”

She reminded me that of course I would have mixed feelings. That it’s healthy to miss him and to feel sad that I wasn’t there, but also to be proud that I took this moral stand. I can’t push others to take it with me, but I can take it for myself. All of these things can be true at once, and at the heart of these complicated feelings sits the price we pay for sacrifice.

I think I wanted it to be easier. In general, our internet-based lives have become so convenient that I tend to forget that a large part of the human experience involves pain and loss. Making a sacrifice is supposed to cost us something. It has a pinch of hurt baked right in. We find meaning where there’s a cost to be paid. When it’s free, and easy, and we have to give up nothing at all that matters to us, we aren’t sacrificing anything.

I do know that my small stand in not accepting a free trip to Hawaii is not going to move the needle politically. It’s not likely to do anything at all. But it matters to me. I needed to feel this pinch, this personal cost, to remember that many, many other people don’t have it easy at all. They are terrified, of being grabbed off the street, zip-tied, ripped away from their children, and imprisoned in horrendous conditions with no due process.

People are starving in Palestine and being bombed daily with no access to clean water or medicine. And in Ukraine, where their courageous refusal to bend the knee to a ruthless dictator has led to a war dragging on for years with an incredibly high price tag of sacrifice for so many Ukrainians.

There comes a time when each one of us has to draw a line that we simply cannot cross and live with ourselves. Lately, I’m disgusted by my own cowardice. I look to those who were captured on the Global Sumud Flotilla and I feel ashamed. I want to do more, to feel the pain of the sacrifice, to say NO MORE to this capitalist greed and mindless destruction of our planet and our resources and our compassion so billionaires can become richer and more powerful.

We all have to start where we are. To do what we can. To remember that sacrifice is supposed to cost us. Nothing worth achieving in life is free. It hurts, and these political systems that have become so evil and powerful and unfair will have to collapse and then be rebuilt, which will mean a lot of sacrifice for a lot of people. I’m practicing that now, holding it in my hands to see what it feels like.

I’m crying my tears when they come, and trying to keep my anguished heart open. I’m looking for more ways to speak up, to be involved, to believe that ordinary people have to be the ones to heal this mess and be brave enough to imagine a better future together. It will hurt, and it will cost us, and we must hold true to what we believe and who we are at our core. Otherwise the evil will win, and that’s not a situation I can countenance.

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Politics, Spiritual Life, Writing

Morality Still Matters

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Lately, scrolling through the news makes me so depressed that one question keeps floating up through my subconscious into my feverish mind: Does morality still matter? Is it important to care about what’s right and what’s wrong when so few people in positions of power (or their supporters) no longer seem to give a shit?

To find an answer, I turned to Omar El Akkad’s newest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’s a brilliant writer, and I adore his novels, so I knew his thoughts on the ongoing hellish nightmare that is the oppression of the Palestinian people in Gaza would help me unlock the deer-in-the-headlights feeling I’ve had about this monstrosity.

Not only did Omar El Akkad help me to better understand the nuances, he stirred up within my soul a twinned grief and rage that I’ve been trying to subdue, but find that these feelings have now been unleashed. And along with them I feel a blanket of shame, that I waited so long to engage my compassion and find the courage to use my voice.

In El Akkad’s book, he makes the point so much better than I could that morality still matters. That the performative noise we make in the west as liberals so we can feel like good people while doing nothing practical that could cost us personally or professionally is not only useless, it’s damaging to our souls and does real damage to people on the other side of the world.

In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad writes “The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: when it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”

If we can’t care about starving children shot while trying to get scraps of food, then our moral compass is broken. My moral compass has been broken, because I was afraid to access my compassion. To speak up when it might be politically unpopular to do so. To tell myself that the issues were too complex for me to understand. But a live-streamed genocide that I choose to ignore so I don’t have to get involved is not complicated. It’s simple cowardice.

When writing about how western liberals try to have it both ways, by feeling like moral human beings while doing nothing to stop these atrocities, El Akkad asks, “How does one finish the sentence: It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

I finally know how to finish that sentence. It’s well past time for action. To recognise and state aloud that my morality is meaningless when it might cost me something so I do nothing to help. Each one of us must draw a line and say we side with justice or with power. We cannot do both. The people of Gaza, like the people of Ukraine, need our help. If you are like me and you read novels about acts of courage during World War II, then we are well past our moment to step up and say, “no more.”

I don’t know exactly what this means for me, or for you, or for any of us. But I know that looking away is not an option. Choosing not to care because it hurts is cowardly. All of that apathy turns us away from ourselves, from our souls, from our shared humanity. We have to care about starving children like they were our beloved children. Because they are.

I don’t want war. I want peace. But I also want justice for those who are oppressed and starved and beaten and murdered because of politics and power. If I believe morality still matters, then this matters. Even when it costs me something, I have to be willing to act. To not stay silent. To do my part, whatever that part is, to stop this evil and to engage all of my grief, rage, and shame for taking so long and turning away so callously.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. The first is from Angela Davis, who writes “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” And the second is from Omar El Akkad’s must-read book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it? How can you have any moral standing if you are so susceptible to abandoning hope?”

In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, University

Middle Age Stress

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Late this spring, my doctor took my blood pressure and expressed concern about how high it was. “What type of stress are you under right now?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing, really,” I replied. She prodded a little, and then I said, “I just finished grad school, and I suppose that was stressful, but it’s over now. My husband and I are going to marriage counselling for the first time, because we’re about to celebrate our 25th anniversary and we’ve been trying to make some significant changes in the way our relationship functions. And my daughter moved out last year for university and I miss her so much. My son is going into grade 12 and I’ve been seeing a counsellor to prepare for an empty nest. We’re going to Europe this July, visiting 10 countries in 3.5 weeks, and there’s been a lot of prep, but other than that, I can’t think of anything.”

My doctor stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time, then she said in a gentle tone, “Julianne, any one of those things could cause a lot of stress. Add them all together and I can see why your blood pressure is so high.”

I burst into tears. I realised after that appointment how tempting it can be to minimise my experiences. I’ve spent a lifetime doing that, so that I’m not causing difficulties or discomfort to anyone else. I bear all of that shit myself, until it becomes so heavy that I can’t carry it any longer and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

That happened for me this past June. But I couldn’t begin to understand or even acknowledge it then. Even now, months later, it still feels strange to type it out here. I feel removed from the story. It’s like I’m watching it happen to someone else.

My wonderful doctor told me to look after myself more. To get more sleep, to try a variety of lifestyle changes in order to lower my blood pressure. I remember saying to her, quite indignantly, “My blood pressure has always been perfect.” She responded with, “We’re all healthy until we’re not.”

I felt mild shame about my increased blood pressure, even when my doctor assured me that it wasn’t a character flaw. But it felt like one. We went to Europe, and I struggled my way through the trip that was designed as a celebration of our quarter-century marriage, my fiftieth birthday, Ava’s belated high school graduation and my MFA grad. Each day in a new country felt overwhelming and frightening. I was lost, and couldn’t recognise myself, which frankly scared the shit out of me.

This fall, my doctor suggested hormone therapy as we began to realise that so many of my symptoms were tied to perimenopause. I started on estrogen, and after a few weeks I stopped crying all the time for no discernible reason and a host of other symptoms started to abate. But my blood pressure remained high, so I just started on a low dose of medicine to try to bring that down.

It’s lovely to feel supported and cared for in my doctor’s office. It’s one of the first times in my life I’ve had this level of kindness from a medical professional. I’m going to turn 51 in just over a month, and my 50th year has been incredibly challenging on a number of fronts. But progress is being made, and that’s worth celebrating. My new counsellor has me saying, “I’m learning how to do things differently” while writing down the words DO LESS and looking at them every day. She has me trying to care for myself the way I’ve long cared for others, and learning how to receive nurture and love which I’m not good at doing.

It’s a strange experience to speak and teach on topics of wellness and mental health, while struggling day by day on a practical level with it myself. I told the teachers I worked with at a conference in October that I’m working on allowing myself to be sad, and scared, and giving myself permission to not have all the answers. It was truly beautiful how many teachers told me after my sessions how much my vulnerability had meant to them. In theory, I knew that vulnerable sharing is the key to true connection with others, but to understand this by experiencing it was next-level stuff.

I know from talking to several friends that this perimenopause/menopause journey (that’s an overly generous word for it; the first one I typed was ‘nightmare’) can last five or more years. Some who are on the other side of it told me to use these uncomfortable symptoms as an invitation to slow down, and take better care of myself. My counsellor says this stage is about getting comfortable with grieving for the end of childbearing and bringing up children. It’s painful to finish one chapter and move into another one, but that process happens so many times in our lives. Grief feels like a spot-on word.

So we carry on. I’m trying to be gentler, and move a little slower, and stay present. It’s helpful to know that others have gone through this and survived (even eventually thrived). I’d love to hear from you if you have any words of wisdom or encouragement for me in these new and weird perimenopause days. It feels so big and scary in the middle of it, but I also know it’s natural and an important life transition. Most of all, it’s great to know we are not alone.

In Books, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Speaking, Writing

The Flashlight of Criticism

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
The Flashlight of Criticism

When we face criticism, we can spiral down in a funnel of shame, feeling less-than and outed for pretending to be better than we really are.

Or maybe that’s just me, because possibly my childhood was not as stellar as yours.

I know it’s unhealthy to attach my self-worth to my performance. These things are my products: writing, speaking, acting, grades; my identity is something different. This distinction is oh-so-clear in my head and not so obvious in my experience.

Everything in the arts is subjective. One person loves what you’ve written or taught, and the next person thinks it’s boring and useless. As a writer, I’ve volunteered to be criticized to try to make my work stronger and more effective. In a cold, clinical setting, I do understand this.

But in my heart it’s something different. Being told what is “wrong” with my manuscript is painful in some intricate way. It reminds me of how far I have yet to go to make my dreams into reality. I do realize that all writers face this. I’ve been through classes and writers’ groups before, processing negative feedback, but I still hurt at first.

Maybe it’s time to just allow this. To feel it, and not to attempt to rationalize it away or explain it. Some feedback wounds because we have more internal healing work to do. The criticism is a flashlight revealing our hidden chasms where shame and fear lurk in the darkness.

The key might be to reach out to the cheerleaders in our lives when we get knocked down. To ask for love and support so we can summon the energy to keep going, to continue believing that we are onto something as long as we don’t quit. Rough work is better than no work when it comes to creativity. Revisions exist to fix the little things.

I’m loving the process of working on this new YA novel. I don’t want to forget that. It’s fun to write, even if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s the book I longed to find on the shelf when I was 15 years old and that kind of passion is worth pursuing.

Often a pain that doesn’t fit with the circumstances is an indication that an old wound is being disturbed. That’s what I felt last week through a workshop round of mild criticism: a very old childhood fear that I am simply not good enough to compete in the arena I want to work in. The only way to combat this is to keep going anyway. To feel it, acknowledge it, cry a few tears, and then get back to work.

In Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships

Messages of Love to Ourselves

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Messages of Love to Ourselves

Last week I went to a laser clinic for information on removing a raised red bump on my scalp under my hair. It’s been growing there for some time, since Ava was a baby, and I checked it with my doctor a few years ago and he said not to worry about it.

Lately it’s been itchy around the area and I’m weary of warning those cutting my hair about avoiding it. So I went to a laser clinic.

Apparently, what I have is called a “ruby point”. I’ve left this one so long that it will be expensive to remove, taking several appointments instead of just one. The technician pointed out several small rubies developing along my hairline and on my neck and chest.

I went home from the consultation utterly dejected. I hate spending money in general, but certainly dropping hundreds of dollars on cosmetic surgery offends my thrifty ways. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that I identified what my internal monologue was whispering to me after this appointment.

That persistent voice went something like this: Julianne, you are such an idiot. How could you let this thing grow on your head for over a decade without doing something about it? Anyone with sense would’ve known better. And what the hell is wrong with you that more of these ruby point things are growing all over you?

The voice was relentless, mean and forceful. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of shame and guilt. What was wrong with me? It was only when I finally sat down with my journal and tried to sort out why I was hurting that I could see how devastating this line of thought was. It’s not my fault I’m prone to these ruby points. And I did check the one on my head with a doctor who wasn’t concerned about it. Now it’s becoming an issue for me so I’m getting it removed.

Recognizing my unconscious nasty messaging to myself was so helpful, for it meant I could choose to mute those cruel words. I did not have to surrender my joy and peace to that angry noise. I am worth this money I must spend to take care of my health. I am not a burden to my family, like I initially feared. (Talking about this with Jason over dinner was so reassuring. He is usually kinder to me than I am to myself. He said, “Go for it, don’t worry about what it costs. You need to get this done.”)

I am loved and valued and it’s okay to prioritize my skincare. I made the appointment for this afternoon to laser off the big ruby point and after that I can make a plan to deal with the smaller ones.

It’s important to stop and look at what our subconscious is actually saying to us. Much of what we hear can be traced back to faulty messaging from our childhood or other critical points in our past, but the wonderful news is that we do not have to listen to that vitriol any longer. We can love ourselves through any hardship.

I’m grateful that this health issue is not a serious one. It’s pricey, but others are facing much scarier and more uncertain problems. I will hold that gratitude close, and work on making sure the messages I give myself are ones of love instead of scorn or derision.

How about you? What does your self-talk sound like?