The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

Maybe you don’t need to find more energy, maybe you just need to find a dream that makes you actually want to get up in the morning. Maybe you need to find something that gives back more than it takes. Maybe you need to stop trying to be good at the hundred things that do not light up your soul, and finally choose the one that does—the one that asks you to risk, to lay your heart bare, to try again, even though you’re scared. You’re not failing because you’re not motivated. You’re not supposed to get far on a path that was never yours to walk.

That the very moment that you honor where you are with complete surrender, you open to the next experience life wants to offer.

You tell life what you want, and life tells you how to get it. When you ask for soulmate love, you must listen if life says, but not with them.

What feels on the surface like rejection is often redirection. When you ask for a big life, you cannot keep fighting for a smaller one to stay.

What is meant for you will arrive in your life and it will remain in your life.

You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be.

What is happening around you when you are the most peaceful, open-minded, inspired version of yourself? What is happening when you are not? Is it possible that healing could look like making the smallest amendments and seeing how wide their effects might ricochet?

When we deny ourselves the authentic experience of being alive, we reach for more when what we really want is not to stretch wider, but to go deeper.

Love is something you build, attraction is something you find.

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

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

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.

Sometimes, the walls that you once constructed as a safeguard become the same thing that prevents your love from pouring into your own life.

What once kept you safe begins to hold you back—the series of self-defeating ideas that serve little purpose other than to dissuade you from connection, than to remind you not to reach out from behind your fortress, lest you get burned.

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 begin to understand that the desire for grandiosity is a projection of the lack of true depth you feel within.

It is okay to want a quiet kind of life. A life that is biggest within the little things, the moments that are not so overt in their impressiveness, but if you really pay attention, open up a space in your chest most people have not yet realized even exists.

You are meant to change. You are meant to change your mind. You are meant to change your perception. You are meant to change what you think you want within this world.

The truth is that it has to challenge you in order to change you.

You don’t need a life without a fight. You need a life worth fighting for.

When you feel even the smallest bit of happiness, slow down. Stretch that moment as wide as you possibly can.

Growing up is realizing it’s not all for you. Not every trend, not every moment, not every person, not every opportunity, not every idea. It’s not all going to fit, it’s not all going to flow, it’s not all going to apply. But it’s also learning to not see this as a negative. It’s learning to become the best version of yourself, not somebody else.

No two loves are repeatable because the chemical reaction between souls, the merging of little universes, makes a world all its own, a compound that cannot be recreated.

Yes, that love was incomparable, but there are other exquisite things, too. Find them. Let them engulf you.

You are not meant to be flowering all of the time, and that is precisely what makes it so special, so sacred, when you do.

You came here to grow—not to acquire or accumulate, not to be perceived perfectly or attain every charm in the world. You came here to deepen, to let go. To tie loose ends, to give closure. To love; to love.

How do you know what to do next? You ask yourself, honestly, what your 90-year-old self would advise you to do. What they would have wished you had done. You ask yourself, honestly, what you’ve sensed from the beginning. What you have ignored, what you have quieted and distracted yourself from. You make two lists, the positives and the negatives, and you weigh them. And if there is one thing on the left that overpowers the dozen things on the right, then you trust that. You ask yourself what path will make you more of the person you are meant to be.

It is time to take your life back. The life you lost to fear, the life you lost to the opinions you valued over your own happiness. The life you lost because it couldn’t fit within the image that the world has made you think is ideal. The life you lost because you came to believe you were not worthy of your own joy, your own path, your own truth. The life you lost because you put it on hold, hid it behind a someday, a maybe, a should be, a would be if only you found the courage to take even the

You must learn not to allow fear to rob you of your life. You must learn not to project your perception of limitation onto a limitless world.

You don’t have to figure your entire life out today. Show up a little more as the person you want to be. Tomorrow, do it again.

You might not see it in front of you yet, but if you feel it within, you have the capacity to bring it to life. Bridging the space between what you envision and what you actually experience is the journey of your life.

If it is truly meant for you, it will come back to you. If it is truly meant for you, it will leave only for the sake of teaching you the lessons you could only learn on your own. If it is truly meant for you, it will return even if you’ve pushed it away, even if you’re in denial, even if you assume something so beautiful could never be truly yours—because if it is truly meant for you, it is never not a piece of you.

If it is truly meant for you, the path you take when you turn away from it will be the road that leads you to it.

If you promise yourself that they will not stop you, then they will be able to hold nothing over you.

You owe yourself your own approval, your own appreciation. You owe it to yourself to become as you’ve always wanted to