The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

Self-protection is learning how to take a pause between what you feel and how you react. When there is no awareness between what you perceive and the way that you respond, anything can control you. Practice the pause. Widen the space between what you sense and what you do about it. Decide what’s worth your energy, because what you engage with is what you empower.

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.

A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself. That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more. That it’s okay for things to be just as they are. Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.

Like the changing of a season, everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after, in all you feared would never come. You’re through it, but you’re different, because something also moved through you and cleared out what you didn’t even realize was standing in the way.

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.

Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality. Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real. Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life. Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you. These little signs are not so little—they are the markers of our soulmates, in all the forms they come.

Maybe you should trust that in what isn’t working, because it might be trying to guide you to what will.

You’ll always return to what you really are, you will always come back to your truth. If there is anything greater than happiness, it is coming to this realization and living with this knowledge. You are all that is steady and safe within you.

The things you want to create also want to be created through you. What you are longing to bring into the world is also what the world is longing for you to bring it.

You become who you really are when you start choosing the things that you actually find meaningful and worthwhile.

when you begin to realize there is no substitute for your own love finally flowing through your own life.

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.

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.

When you feel a connection waning, that is when you must remind yourself not to steer another human being’s destiny. That is when you must remind yourself that you cannot assume the dream you had for them is the same one they have for themselves. 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. Learning to love in this way is the only way to experience true intimacy, not formed upon the basis of expectation or need, but the free will of two souls who see no more preferable way to spend their energy than on one another. That is what you are really waiting for—love that is intuitive and clear, that does not make you question or doubt how worthy you are of being prioritized, of being invested in. Love that chooses you as you choose it.

Your idea of yourself will reform as you give yourself solid, undeniable, consistent proof that you are different than you once believed yourself to be.

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

Not everyone is going to understand your journey because not everyone is meant to. Not everyone has made peace with their inner longings, nor paused to sincerely reflect upon themselves, or how they really intend to be. The nature of your transit will only emphasize some people’s stuckness, the fortress around themselves that they’ve come to feel is an essential shield they cannot live without. What can be so unnerving about someone else’s development is the part of ourselves we recognize as desiring that same change so deeply—and what it is within us that resists it in equal measure. 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.

There is nothing scarier than the idea of leaving what is good for the hope of what may be exceptional. What you do not realize, at that moment, is that you have already decided. The path forward is now about becoming comfortable with that choice, through all the mental gymnastics, justifications, explanations, and processing that it may bring. In the end, you already know. You are not finding your answers. You are finding your courage.

it’s impossible to know the full impact of the moment you are in right now. 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.

Nobody tells you that the experiences once so clear within your mind can fade into nonexistence; nobody tells you that you will eventually think about every last thing that haunts you for the very last time, and you will not even realize it is the last.

Nobody can explain the intricacies and complexities of what your life will be about, because that is for you and you alone to determine.

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

You either live at the edge of your curiosity, or from the backseat of your doubt. Neither are perfectly comfortable, but one is far more worthwhile.

What can seem as though it is your unraveling is sometimes your rebalancing.

When the moment comes, learn to live beyond the expectations you once had for yourself. Have faith. 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.