The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

There are a lot of things you can give up on in this life, but love is not one of them.

You have to believe in love up until the very end—real love, true love, honest love.

Until you confront the shadow of your own self-disapproval, you will always be gazing out at the world in fear of who might not love you completely, who might draw your awareness to the part of you that already believes you are unworthy of being appreciated, of being fully and truly known.

Your willingness to do so is testimony not to your failure nor your inadequacy but your faith on fire with the knowledge that even still, even here, there is something greater that is waiting to be seen.

In everything you choose, you must first ask: but what will this do to my soul?

When it feels like nothing is happening, that’s when everything is about to happen. Don’t get so used to chaos that peace feels like something’s wrong. Love is something you build, attraction is something you find. Nobody has everything, but everyone has something—focus on your something. If you really start to pay attention, you will be amazed at what you find.

The space between no longer and not yet is what defines the pivot periods of our lives. This is the time when we have nothing left to hold onto but also nowhere clearly to land. This is when most people revert back to their oldest and most familiar coping mechanisms, confusing what’s known for what’s right. If we find the courage to hold our hearts open throughout this process, what we find is that we create an opportunity for miracles to find us, to take root in us, to change us through and through. If we find the resilience to make peace with the unknown, to not require every answer to keep moving forward, to believe that everything will work out one way or another—we begin to live more completely in the moment, releasing the illusions that had been clouding us all along.

You do not have to be perfect. You just have to keep going. You have to keep moving in the direction of your dreams.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are supposed to have days in which you are so self-assured followed by nights where you gaze into the sky and wonder if this is all there is. You are supposed to have years that feel like weeks and weeks that feel like years. You are supposed to get rejected sometimes. You are supposed to have people disagree with you at times. You are supposed to be a little lost now and again. You are not supposed to have all of the answers. Nothing is wrong with you.

You will not truly feel settled until you have done what you came here to do. Until you have reached into yourself and pulled out the most glimmering thing about you, and held it up for the world to see. Until you have completed the work that only you could do, in only the way that you can do it. Until you have made your gifts into an offering. Until you have stopped trying to live up to some ancient concept of perfection, but instead seek the radiating fullness of a life devoted to that which you alone are most suited for, what you alone are most destined to complete.

Life is a blank canvas upon which our subconscious minds paint pieces of our souls. What matters is not so much what’s in front of you, but what’s within it that you see. That is what will tell you everything you need to know.

You’re not looking for anyone else to give you the answers, you’re looking for what you already know to be reflected back to you. You already know what’s true.

They serve to show us not that we need to seek another human heart but that we need to remember to nurture the one we already have.

You must learn to ask yourself: Where does this thought intend to bring me? Is it attempting to give a deeper clarity, or disturb calmed waters? It is something my most empathetic, compassionate, empowered self would believe? Must I choose to act on it? Will I?

The measure of a life well-lived is not how often you have avoided discomfort, pressure, or change, but the grace with which you navigated it. To say that you faced not even a fraction of resistance within your life proves nothing more than that you were defined by nothing: tried for nothing, stood for nothing, did nothing with the gifts that were given to you. I know it seems like the absolute worst thing in the world is to be disapproved of, but the actual worst thing is to paralyze yourself under the guise that you might be able to avoid any friction. The merit is not in whether or not you have ever experienced anything challenging, but the courage with which you faced what challenged you. That is what matters. That is what defines who you are.

When you feel a connection waning, that is when you must remind yourself not to steer another human being’s destiny.

To love someone is to allow them to be sovereign.

Rather than spending more of your time trying to work through your conceptual self, move out of your head and touch your life.

Not everyone is going to understand your journey because not everyone is meant to.

Please remember that your experience is not validated in proportion to how much sense it makes to others. Even if you are the only person in the entire world who knows where you are going, that is more than enough to make it all the way there.

When you know who you are becoming, it is a lot easier to make peace with who you’ve been. It’s a lot easier to dissect the past for the lessons you needed to learn, and then let the rest go. The experiences that delivered you those essential pieces of knowledge—no matter how uncomfortable they were at the onset—were not useless. They were not wasted. Your pain was not for nothing, your hurt was not meaningless. You completed the most daring task of all, which is to look into the recesses of your own fear and find hope, find meaning, and find a greater truth.

The fire can only burn what is not meant to be.

Your story is not for everyone. If they have not proven that they intend to hear you and hold you gently, you are under no obligation to share the most raw details of yourself with them. There are some things you are allowed to keep sacred, that you are allowed to keep small. This is not denying yourself, it is protecting yourself. It is reminding yourself that in a world where it has become normal to broadcast every detail of your existence, it is okay to practice discernment. It is okay to be intentional about who holds your most vulnerable pieces.

You are not the ways in which you had to harden yourself to get through the chapters you had no other way to face. You are not the person you became to cope with the experiences you would never have chosen for yourself. You are the person who is confronting these empty parts of yourself and releasing them. You are the person who is asking yourself to keep going, who is asking to keep healing. You are the person who is still here today.

You are not finding your answers. You are finding your courage.

Trust in the way the microcosms sometimes falter, as there are far more important things being constructed in their wake.

If you feel like you need to be where you are for a little while longer, you are probably right. If you feel like there’s more to release, there probably is. If you think you’re on the precipice of the breakthrough, you probably are. Just because you can’t see the end yet, or understand how it will all come together, does not mean that you aren’t still exactly where you are meant to be.

You don’t have to trust in what you cannot yet see, but be willing to give yourself wholly to this moment and let it transform you in the ways it’s trying to. You know more than you think you do.

You have to let yourself be seen in the smallest ways. Then you have to keep going, and keep growing. You don’t have to wake up tomorrow and be instantly better. You just have to practice thawing out what’s gone cold and stiff within you. Do not allow your comfort zone to become your cage.

Nobody tells you that death and rebirth can occur all in the same body.

This is what it means to be fully alive—not to always know where you are headed, but to know that eventually, you will arrive.

There’s something about learning to live with a positive curiosity—to course-correct the constant wondering of what may be going wrong, what is hinging on collapse, what grave error or misstep you have not accounted for. Turn your capacity to downboard-think into something that supports your growth. Consider, instead, how you might be pleasantly surprised, how it may be easier than you think, that there might be some vital lesson or realization attempting to emerge through your current experience. Consider, instead, how infrequently the worst case scenario has ever come to pass, and then consider how ruminating on it isn’t protecting you from it, but allowing your mind to piece and filter that particular reality more clearly into form.

If you understand that life is about the little things, you will never find yourself wanting more than what’s in front of you. You will understand that true joy is using what you have, being where you are, and loving the souls who have chosen to walk with you. You will begin to understand that the desire for grandiosity is a projection of the lack of true depth you feel within.

You don’t have to run forever. The answers you’re looking for have probably been with you all along. The journey is about strengthening your inner resolve to choose what you have always known is right, even if the world would not understand, even if you might disappoint some people, even if it might scare you or challenge you or make you feel vulnerable in a way you never have before. I hope you will discover that making it is not always about where you end up, but how you take each step. When you change your relationship with today, you change your relationship with tomorrow.

Maybe your life will be a lighthouse for the other aching hearts yearning to know that there is another way to walk through their years, that there is still hope amid it all.

You are not broken for not being able to effortlessly release. You are being asked to look at yourself with full honesty, and see an empty space in which you are actually primed for the most dramatic growth. It keeps calling to you because there’s something it wants you to do with it, there’s something within it that still wants to be seen.

It is heavy because you are not supposed to carry it this far, for this long. It is heavy because it was never really yours in the first place. It is heavy because humans are not meant to keep holding within them relics of the most painful parts of the past. It’s heavy because it’s carrying an old world into a new one. It’s heavy because it’s asking you to put it down. It’s heavy because some part of you can sense who you would become without it. It’s heavy because you’ve lightened in some way, and so the fragmented parts of you that are too dense to move with you must finally be put to rest.

You are not the culmination of what you once were. You can defy the past. You can become what you decide to be.

You think of happiness as a constant forward motion, a kind of growing that looks like a never-ending accumulation, when it is in truth consistent effort in the same direction.

Instead of trying to figure out whether or not something is definitely right for you, just notice what creates resonance or dissonance.

A big part of finding yourself is discovering the pieces of yourself you first see in other people. The other human beings who embody something so familiar but seemingly out of reach, who can evoke within you the heaviness of envy or the lightness of inspiration—both equally attempting to guide you to self-realization. Please, whatever you do, never forget that what you observe in others is also dormant in you. You are not coming into knowledge of a space in which you lack but a space in which you are most primed to expand and grow. The tension is not the result of another person occupying what could be yours to stand in, but the revelation of how much you are suppressing that they allow to flow out of themselves—how much they are willing to embrace. Your ego will want to make people like this your enemies. Your soul knows that they are your teachers in disguise.

It is easy to see all that is wrong within the world, but harder to dive inward—the place from which all the world is born.

How much more could you gain from your experiences if your expectation wasn’t that you were supposed to be initially and unquestionably perfect, but that the sculpting of your soul would emerge through the consistency by which you showed up and kept trying, kept going, kept forging yourself through the fire of your own fear?

Sometimes, our dominant stream of thinking is not the most clear representation of our truest inner selves. Our bodies speak in subtle ways, and as we learn to pay attention to not only what we hear, but also what we sense, we awaken an entirely new level of living, an entirely new way of being.

You either see things through a critical lens, or a creative one. You either spend your life constantly evaluating how each thing around you is not enough, or you shift your perspective to wonder how you can turn all that you have into anything you ever wanted. You either seek out and focus on the ways in which you are imperfect, or you see within those imperfections cracks through which your greatest growth, your greatest purpose, and your greatest vision will emerge.

Your inner wisdom isn’t supposed to give you every answer to your entire life, but to show you to the next right step.

but having sincere faith that what we know needs to happen next is the key that eventually unlocks everything we’ve been waiting for, everything we’ve ever wanted to be.

When you love your life exactly the way it is, it transforms into everything you’ve always wanted it to be.

You participate in your suffering when you take action to delay, avoid, resist, or fracture that awareness of your feeling states and end up stuck beneath them.

Life knows things you don’t. It’s heard conversations you haven’t. It’s realized the truth about some people you have not yet completely come to know. Trust life when it seems like the very things you want most suddenly no longer want you back. You have to believe that life is protecting your heart from any further damage. It is ensuring you will not waste another hour of your precious time on what’s not in your best interest. Life is not turning its back on you, so you must learn to not turn your back on it.