The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

Will it impress others, but disappoint the child inside me waiting to see what I do with my freedom?

Will I arrive at the end of my life proud that I did this?

Don’t depend on anyone, but learn to rely on the ones you trust.

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

This is the time when we have nothing left to hold onto but also nowhere clearly to land.

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

Love exists in myriad ways, but the assumption that this singular form of it will lift you up above your human experience, sanitize your pain, and make the rest of your days a fever dream is not only untrue, it’s unhelpful.

Our fantasies about other people are never really about how someone else might give us their love. Instead, they mirror our unawakened love back to us.

Where does this thought intend to bring me?

It is something my most empathetic, compassionate, empowered self would believe?

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.

To love someone is to allow them to be sovereign.

It is to honor their path and their ability to choose how they want to spend their time and their life.

Love that chooses you as you choose it.

The point is to let some parts of yourself disintegrate within the fire of your personal transformation.

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 ...

Maybe it’s about developing the courage to take those first steps.

Maybe there are still dreams inside of you that have not yet come to light.

When you know who you are becoming, it is a lot easier to make peace with who you’ve been.

one of us—gets to the end of this life with our hearts entirely unscarred, because that would mean they were also untouched.

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 the person who is confronting these empty parts of yourself and releasing them.

If you understand that life is about the little things, you will never find yourself wanting more than what’s in front of you.

the desire for grandiosity is a projection of the lack of true depth you feel within.

When you change your relationship with today, you change your relationship with tomorrow.

You will learn to hear someone’s disapproval and not immediately internalize it but simply witness it as their experience:

If it keeps bringing your attention back toward it, there is a lesson within it that still needs to be extracted.

It is heavy because you are not supposed to carry it this far, for this long.

You can become what you decide to be.

Happiness is something that is gently built.

Ask yourself if it makes your body gently contract or expand.

Ask yourself if it gives at least as much energy as it takes.

A big part of finding yourself is discovering the pieces of yourself you first see in other people.

never forget that what you observe in others is also dormant in you.

Sometimes, our focus on other people’s perceptions of us is a way to supplant our sense that something isn’t quite right, as if by convincing those around us that we are on our true path, we might somehow be a little closer than we were before.

The more you get better at anticipating your future needs, the easier it becomes to be present within your life.

Trust life when it seems like the very things you want most suddenly no longer want you back.

Life is not turning its back on you, so you must learn to not turn your back on it.

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.

It takes strength to be different, to be humble, and to change.

Despite all it has been through, your heart is still asking you to let it be seen, to let it be loved.

It is okay to disappear for a while to work on yourself. It is okay to disappear for a while and start over. It is okay to wipe the slate clean and begin again.

If your worth is not self-evident to them, they are not worthy of your effort to convince them otherwise.

The storm isn’t running out of rain because you’re chasing the clouds. You’re seeking them out because you think you don’t deserve the light of day.

The storm can become our comfort zone.

Sometimes, when the light hits your eyes after staring for so long into the darkness, it is painful.

It takes a lot of heart to be willing to hurt, to be willing to open up, to be willing to keep trying, no matter how many times you must keep rediscovering your inner flame.