101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

Personal integrity.

The people who were able to hurt you most were also the people whom you were able to love the most.

there are so many factors that alter and shift our perspectives that are completely in our control but totally out of our awareness.

Cultivating a sense of gratitude—which is not waiting for a feeling of being happy with your life but choosing it by actively focusing on what you’re fortunate, grateful, and proud to have—is essential to ever feeling satisfied with your life, because it puts you in a mindset to seek more to be grateful for. As anybody can tell you: What you seek, you ultimately find.

If you want your life to be different, do differently.

What you most dislike in others is, in some variation, true of you: You just haven’t been able to acknowledge it yet.

So figure out what you most need to heal within yourself by seeing what you most want to change in others. Doing so will free you in a way you can’t imagine. Doing so is a necessary piece of the life-you-want puzzle, because all the energy you’re using trying to avoid, deflect, delude your way into not acknowledging what you need to heal/change/deal is being wasted, at best, and is actually actively keeping you from the life you want, at worst.

What is worth suffering for?

What owns you in this life? Is it your desire for happiness? The past? The relationship that almost-was-but-ultimately-didn’t? Your body hang-up? Your fear? Your loneliness? Your lack of self-worth? Everybody has one thing that ultimately owns them, drives them, controls them at some visceral level. It’s the pattern that everything else is rooted in; it’s the issue that crops up again and again. It’s what you insatiably seek, then run away from, only to find you ran right into it. What owns you in this life makes up the majority of what you do, so you need to know what it is.

Finding the shard of empathy and hope and understanding, tucked deeply within your existential suffering.

You love in others what you love in yourself. You hate in others what you cannot see in yourself.

They want not and waste not, keep in their space only things that are meaningful or useful.

The point of anything is not what you get from having done it; it’s who you become from having gone through it.

Sages teach that we’re designed for the messiness and simplicity of everyday life—that desiring an external “more” is a mechanism of the ego. It’s not transcendence, it’s avoidance.

A good life isn’t passionate, it’s purposeful.

Passion is the spark that lights the fire; purpose is the kindling that keeps the flame burning all night.

The genuine things, the best things, the “most right” things, truly just are.

Hearing something a dozen times and then finally understanding what it means only when it becomes the answer to a problem you have.

The love you know you’re eventually “meant” for.

The feeling of realizing that your “purpose” won’t usually feel like a “purpose” as you have to do the work regardless and so the whole act of “finding it” was just a mechanism of the ego in the first place.

A person or thing that also feels like “home” (a non-house home).

Never realize that bit by bit, you created the life you never really wanted with the pieces you never really chose.

A quick cheat sheet for you: The heart will tell you what; the mind will tell you how. Let them stay in their corners of expertise.

The things that torture us and the negative patterns that follow us and the reason we have to keep making the same resolutions year after year is that we are not making the shift, we are trying to shift other things.

Choose change. Your routine, your job, your city, your habits, your mindset. Never sit and fester in frustration. It does not matter whether or not you’re in the absolute worst-case scenario, complaining, worrying or being negative will never help. Anything. At all. Ever.

Everything you do, see, and feel is a reflection of not who you are, but how you are. You create what you believe. You see what you want. You’ll have what you give.

acquiring another 0 at the end of the balance on your bank statement, or a variety of new things (that really just represent your perceived worth or lack thereof) only changes how much you have surrounding you, not how deeply or sincerely you can appreciate them, feel them, enjoy them, want them, be happy because of them.

External acquisition does not yield internal contentment.

I often look around at older people and wonder how we’ve confused “respecting your elders” with allowing them to believe it’s okay to stop learning after age 23 and let them sit and fester in the prejudices of the generation in which they were raised.

There’s something…fun…in making problems for ourselves.

A body is responsible for the most amazing part of anything—physically finding or creating.

What if what we feel in those little moments we want to escape and place in the context of a greater meaning is the meaning itself?

Avoidant If you are someone with avoidant attachment, you were likely the child of parents who were emotionally unavailable and insensitive to your genuine needs. You became a “little adult” at a young age, avoided (and still avoid) expressing true pain or need for help (especially to parents/caretakers), and highly value your independence, almost to a fault. You are self-contained and most comfortable alone. Your parents likely punished you for feeling anything other than “happy,” or at least shamed you for crying or expressing your feelings in any way that wasn’t convenient for them. This likely has lead to intimacy issues, as you struggle to be your whole self around someone else. If you’re struggling in your relationships, it’s because you’ve grown to associate “imperfections” with dismissal. You think that opening up completely and genuinely will inevitably lead to you being unloved or rejected, because you learned at a young age that expressing genuine feelings could be dangerous. You are probably overly accepting of other people’s flaws, but absolutely cannot tolerate any of your own. What you need to do is practice opening up to other people in a genuine way (start with friends, maybe) and see that you won’t be disowned for being who you are. Once you develop a more trusting attitude with others, it will become easier and easier to be intimate.

Disorganized If you formed a disorganized attachment in childhood, it is because your parents or caretakers were abusive, frightening, or even life-threatening. You wanted to escape, yet your livelihood depended on the very people who were hurting you most. You may not have been fully able to escape until adulthood. Your attachment figure was your main source of distress, and to survive, you were forced to begin disassociating from yourself. If you’re struggling in your relationships, it’s because you haven’t learned to listen to your emotional navigation system yet. You aren’t choosing partners you genuinely care about, or are ignoring your instincts because you grew up being forced not to trust yourself. Sure, you were in pain, but if you wanted to survive, you had to ignore that pain and convince yourself everything was all right. What you need to do is some very serious mental/emotional work that likely involves recalling your past trauma, and rewriting your narrative of what happened in your life. You will need to reassociate with your inner guidance system and learn to trust it more than you do your thoughts or ideas.

You become anxious when anticipating social situations, as you feel you cannot just show up as you are, so you will have to “perform” or be subject to judgment from whoever is there.

“What I went through made me who I am; what I’m going through will make me what I will be. What I choose to put my energy toward now will create that person. I decide. My circumstances don’t.”

“I am always one choice away from changing everything.”

Wanting is the ugliest thing you can do.

The focal point of a piece of art wouldn’t exist without the negative space to frame it.

You have to become the kind of person who deserves the life you want. Nobody ever got what they wanted by wanting it badly enough.

We think people who judge others over petty things are terrible, but we’re judging them…for judging…

The universe whispers until it screams.

The things that are meant for us are the things that force us to stop seeking an external light, but to start becoming it. The things that are meant for us are trying and joyous and beautiful and excruciating. They’re the things we don’t think about. The things we don’t have to hold on tightly to make happen.

Success is falling in love with the process, not the outcome.

You don’t “have” to, you “get” to.

You probably can’t be whatever you want, but if you’re really lucky and you work really hard, you can be exactly who you are.

Learn to keep your needs simple and your wants small.

If you want to change your life, stop thinking about how you feel lost and start coming up with actions you can take that move you in a direction—any direction—that’s positive. It’s a lot harder to think your way into a new way of acting than it is to act your way into a new way of thinking.

Nothing is as it is; it is as you are. (That’s a play on an Anaïs Nin quote.)

Here, all the things to consider and reflect on and read over again when you’re feeling particularly terrible.