The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

When someone says to you, you’ve changed, you should reply, how have you not?

The truth is that it has to challenge you in order to change you. It has to make you question whether the parameters you live within are truly your limits or simply the edge of what you’ve grown comfortable with. The truth is that it has to stop you in order to redirect you. It has to test you before it can reward you; it has to trust you before it can open the floodgates. The truth is that it has to bring you to your knees before it can lift you back up into an entirely new reality. It has to show you what’s wrong for you before you’ll understand what’s right.

Please do not allow the heaviness of what holds you to dissuade you from believing in the vision that calls you. Please do not assume that your fear is a finality, a sign of impossibility. Please do not think that just because it is hard, or will take time, or feels far off right now, that you will not one day arrive. One day, everything you fear will never come will be right in front of your eyes.

You go about each day imagining that tomorrow—when things are less busy, the kids are a little older, you’re through this one phase, and the problem at the tip of your mind has resolved itself—you will let yourself actually be present in the day you greet. The illusion is that you’re always one step away from freedom. It’s not one step further into the external, it’s one step inward. One step closer to realizing that this is all there is and this is more than enough.

Believe in yourself before anyone else does, because it is the consistency with which you act on your visions that enables them to transform from ideas into realities the entire world can see.

One of the characteristics of having a big destiny is that things don’t work out for you right away. There are delays and unexpected times of quiet. The plans you had for your life are unraveled and you’re asked to conceive of a new vision, one grander than you had the capacity to imagine in the first place. These rest periods are actually life’s way of giving you an opportunity to work on yourself, to invest in who you want to be. To heal, to release. These times are not just to be tolerated or waited through, but used. They are quiet gifts that will lead you to the path you were really meant to be on.

You either see endings, or within them new beginnings. You either see that you’re living the days your younger self once dreamt of or you’re still waiting on something more. You either see a storm that disrupts your path, or one that corrects your course. You either see the hours as long and thankless, or life as brief and precious. You either see the mysterious unknown, or an endless realm of possibility. There is what you experience, and then there is the story you tell yourself about it. Over time, that story becomes the truth you carry, as the other details fade in the distance. Over time, how you write the narrative determines how you experience reality.

You are here to explore and have a story all your own. Don’t deny yourself that. Don’t deny yourself adventure.

You really can change. You can change because you were designed for it. But you’re never going to if you keep spending your time running into the same walls trying to overpower your resistance rather than asking it what vulnerable part of yourself it’s trying to protect. When you don’t listen to yourself you go to war with yourself, both by trying to force your way and by giving up, by assuming that your first approach is the only one available. Learn from your resistance and your pain. The lesson comes to us not from life, but through living.

The leap of faith is when you step away from what’s good in pursuit of what could be extraordinary.