The Pivot Year

by Brianna Wiest

Will you continue to replay the memories of yesterday, or will you meet the moment and make the most of what is in front of you now?

You are exactly where you need to be.

This is the perfect day to start your life again.

When you finally admit that you do not know what is next, you enter the golden vortex—the space between everything you know you’re meant for and anything you had previously imagined to be.

Happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything. Happiness is knowing you are doing what you can with what you were given. Happiness is not something that comes to you when every problem is solved and all things are perfectly in place, but in the shining silver linings that remind us the light of day is always there, if you slow down enough to notice.

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.

You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. 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.

You will fall in love with life again, and it will be better than it was before, because you will become a different person. You will become someone who is more capable of appreciating what matters, who will not be as reckless with their choices, who can no longer be so easily swayed or mindlessly trusting.

When you ask for soulmate love, you must listen if life says, but not with them.

Declare: I will no longer participate in my own suffering. If I have not one other friend in this world, I will be my own most loyal companion. I will not turn my back on myself. If I am loved by a dozen and not one, I will not focus undue attention on gaining the love of that one. I will speak to myself with compassion. I will not spend my life engaging in things that can only bring about my own unhappiness. From this moment on, I am on my own side.

You may fear the quiet times in your life, when your soul goes through a winter.

You must come to a place of believing you deserve respect, even if you are still a work in progress. You must learn to see yourself with kinder eyes.

Nobody has everything, but everyone has something—focus on your something.

Not everything you lose is a loss. Some things are a freedom. Some things are a second chance. Some things are a miracle in disguise. Some things are a detachment long-needed, a clarity brought to blurry eyes. Some things are an intervention. Some things are the unexpected answer to a long-chanted prayer. Some things are a healing. Some things are a becoming. Some things are planned long before you ever came to be. Some things are a devastation, but others are a kind of vital guidance, the kind of course-correction you did not even know you needed. The kind you did not even realize you were asking for all along.

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 become brave when you realize that you do not have to always feel calm and certain, but be able to find the strength to keep showing up regardless.

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 the culmination of what you once were. You can defy the past. You can become what you decide to be.

Maturity is realizing that you are not supposed to be for everyone.

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