The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

by Brianna Wiest

When we can no longer rely on our coping mechanisms to help distract us from the problems in our lives, it can feel as though we’ve hit rock bottom. The reality is that this sort of awakening is what happens when we finally come to terms with the problems that have existed for a long time. The breakdown is often just the tipping point that precedes the breakthrough, the moment a star implodes before it becomes a supernova.

The fact that you are imperfect is not a sign that you have failed; it is a sign that you are human, and more importantly, it is a sign that you still have more potential within you.

Your mountain is the block between you and the life you want to live. Facing it is also the only path to your freedom and becoming. You are here because a trigger showed you to your wound, and your wound will show you to your path, and your path will show you to your destiny.

The mountain that stands in front of you is the calling of your life, your purpose for being here, and your path finally made clear. One day, this mountain will be behind you, but who you become in the process of getting over it will stay with you always.

What you believe about your life is what you will make true about your life.

your limiting beliefs might come from wanting to keep yourself safe.

To truly heal, you are going to have to change the way you think. You are going to have to become very conscious of negative and false beliefs and start shifting to a mindset that actually serves you. How

It is okay if you are at rock bottom and cannot yet see your way through. It is okay if you are at the foot of your mountain and have failed every time you’ve tried to overcome it.

Rock bottom becomes a turning point because it is only at that point that most people think: I never want to feel this way again.

Rock bottom isn’t a bad day. It doesn’t happen by chance. We only arrive at rock bottom when our habits begin to compound upon one another, when our coping mechanisms have spiraled so out of control that we can no longer resist the feelings we were attempting to hide. Rock bottom is when we are finally faced with ourselves, when everything has gone so wrong, we are left to realize that there is only one common denominator through it all.

We don’t reach a breaking point because one or two things go wrong. We reach a breaking point when we finally accept that the problem isn’t how the world is; it is how we are. This is a beautiful reckoning to have. Ayodeji Awosika describes his own like this: “You must find the purest, purest, purest form of being fed up. Make it hurt. I literally screamed, ‘I’m not going to fucking live like this anymore!’”

To put an end to your self-sabotaging behavior absolutely means that change is on the horizon. Your new life is going to cost you your old one. It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense of direction. It’s going to cost you relationships and friends. It’s going to cost you being liked and understood. It doesn’t matter.

The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward. Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen.

All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are. Remaining attached to your old life is the first and final act of self-sabotage, and releasing it is what we must ...

Sometimes, we run our lives on autopilot for long enough that we begin to think we no longer have a choice.

Success usually exposes you to jealousy and scrutiny. Successful people are not loved in the way that we imagine they would be; they are usually picked apart because envious people need to humanize them in some way.

When you begin to surpass your upper limit, you start to unconsciously sabotage what’s happening in order to bring yourself back to what’s comfortable and familiar. For some people, this manifests physically, often as aches, pains, headaches, or physical tension. For others, it manifests emotionally as resistance, anger, guilt, or fear.

Don’t worry about doing it well; just do it. Don’t worry about writing a bestseller, just write. Don’t worry about making a Grammy-winning hit, just make music. Don’t worry about failing, just keep showing up and trying. At first, all that matters is that you do what you really want to do. From there, you can learn from your mistakes and over time get to the place where you really want to be.

We accomplish these sorts of things when we simply show up and allow ourselves to create something meaningful and important to us.

Stop accepting your own excuses. Stop being complacent with your own justifications. Start quantifying your days by how many healthy, positive things you accomplished, and you will see how quickly you begin to make progress.

A clean, organized space—both for work and for living—is essential to thriving. This means a tidy home, clothes that are easy to reach and put together each morning, a clean kitchen, and an organized desk. Paperwork should be filed in one space, your bedroom should be calming, and everything should have a “home” that it can return to at the end of the day. Without cleanliness, we create fewer opportunities for ourselves. Nothing positive, nor beautiful, flows from chaos. Deep down, we know this. Often, when we are self-sabotaging through disorganization, it is because when we are very clean or organized, we get an uneasy feeling. That uneasy feeling is what we are trying to avoid, because it is the recognition that now that everything is in order, we must get to work on doing

what we need to do or who we want to become.

When you find yourself struggling with something, you have to ask yourself: Do I actually want to do this? Do you want the job, or do you just like how the title sounds? Are you in love with the person, or do you like the idea of the relationship? Are you still holding an outdated idea of what your greatest success will be, and if so, what would it look like to let that go?

Maybe the kind of success you’re really hungry for is to feel at peace each day, or making your life about travel instead of work. Maybe it’s about having thriving friendships or a happy relationship. Maybe the business you got into 10 years ago isn’t the business you want to be in forever. Maybe the work you thought you’d love isn’t coming as naturally to you as you’d hoped. When we let go of what isn’t right for us, we create space to discover what is. However, doing so requires the tremendous courage to put our pride aside and see things for what they really are.

You are not the person you were five years ago. You evolve as your self-image does, so make sure that it’s an accurate one. Give yourself credit for everything you’ve overcome that you never thought you would, and everything you’ve built that you never thought you could. You’ve come so much farther than you think, and you’re so much closer than you realize.

Why do I feel this way?

What is this feeling trying to tell me about the action I am trying to take? Is there something I need to learn here? What do I need to do to honor my needs right now?

Anger is transformative, and it is often the peak state we reach before we truly change our lives. This is because anger is not intended to be projected onto someone else; rather, it’s an influx of motivation that helps us change what we need to change within our lives.

Your need to feel validated is valid. Your need to feel the presence of another person is valid. Your need to feel wanted is valid. Your need to feel secure is valid.

Human beings are hardwired for connection to others and to a group. This is why we exist in subsets, like communities, and families, and generally feel happiest and most fulfilled when we are doing things that serve the greater good. This is a fundamental and healthy part of who we are, and it is not a sign of weakness.

your need to feel financially secure is healthy; it is not always a product of you being greedy or ill-intentioned. Your need to be validated for the work that you do is healthy, and it is not always a product of you being vain. Your need to live in a space and area that you enjoy being in is healthy, and it is not always a product of you being ungrateful for what you have.

The way you are self-sabotaging: Feeling unhappy, even if nothing is wrong, and really, you’ve gotten everything you’ve wanted in life. What your subconscious mind might want you to know: You are probably expecting outside things to make you feel good rather than relying on changing how you think and what you focus on. No outward accomplishment is going to give you a true and lasting sense of inner peace, and your discomfort, despite your accomplishments, is calling your attention to that.

The way you are self-sabotaging: Pushing people away. What your subconscious mind might want you to know: You want people to love and accept you so much that the stress of it all makes you isolate yourself from the pain, effectively creating the reality you’re trying to avoid. Alternatively, needing solitude too often usually means there is a discrepancy between who you pretend to be and who you actually are. When you show up to your life more authentically, it becomes easier to have people around you, as it requires less effort.

The more you blindly trust every random thought or feeling that passes through you, the more you are going to be at the whim of what’s happening around you.

Home is where you make it, not where you find it.

we build our own cages and stay in them, even though there’s no lock on the door.

you cannot force something out of your brain space, no matter how much you don’t want it to be there. You cannot simply loosen your grip, relax a little, and will yourself to stop thinking entirely about something around which your entire world used to orbit. This is not how it goes. You are not going to let go the moment someone tells you to “move on,” the day you realize you have to admit certain defeat, the heart-dropping second it occurs to you that hope is, indeed, futile. You do not let go by simply willing yourself not to care anymore. This is something that people who have never been really, really hung up on something would assume. This is something that people who have never been deeply attached to something for a sense of safety and security and love and their future believe. There is nothing wrong with you because you almost get angry when people tell you to just “let go” so nonchalantly, as though they couldn’t fathom the storms in your head and heart. How can you become so passive about something you have spent so much of your time in your life actively working to maintain and then restore? You can’t, and you don’t.

You start to let go on the day you take one step toward building a new life and then let yourself lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need. You start to let go on the day you realize that you cannot continue to revolve around a missing gap in your life, and going on as you were before will simply not be an option. You start to let go at the moment you realize that this is the impetus, this is the catalyst, this is that moment the movies are made about and the books are written around and songs are inspired by. This is the moment you realize that you will never find peace standing in the ruins of what you used to be. You can only move on if you start building something new.

You let go when you build a new life so immersive and engaging and exciting, you slowly, over time, forget about the past. When we try to force ourselves to “let go” of something, we grip onto it tighter, and harder, and more passionately than ever before. It’s like if someone tells you to not think of a white elephant, that’s the only thing you’ll be able to focus on. Our hearts work the same way as our minds in this regard. As long as we are telling ourselves that we must let go, the more deeply we feel attached. So don’t tell yourself to let go. Instead, tell yourself that you can cry for as long as you need. That you can fall to pieces and be a mess and let your life collapse and crumble. Tell yourself that you can let your foundation fall through. What you will realize is that you are still standing. What you build in the wake and the aftermath of loss will be so profound, so stunning, you will realize that maybe the loss was part of the plan. Maybe it awakened a part of you that would have remained dormant had you not been pushed the way you were. If you are certain that you cannot let go of what is hurting you, then don’t. But take one step today, and another tomorrow, to...

With time, you see that it was not the path. It was what was standing in your way.

The wildest thing about life is how unassumingly it keeps moving. You lose the person closest to you and the world affords you a few days of grieving, and then you’re expected to just keep going. You go through something so life-shifting, mind-altering, and deeply traumatic, then find that society only has a small bandwidth for tolerating your fear.

Here’s what you’re allowed: You’re okay to cry and you’re forgiven for being sad or canceling a few plans here and there. You’re permitted a few days off of work and someone to listen to you vent a handful of times. But processing and accepting the gravity of something that touched every last inch of you is not something you can do on a mental-health day. It’s not something the world affords you enough time for, and so you botch the job. You carry on.

The truth is that you do not change your life when you fix every piece and call that healing. You change your life when you start showing up exactly as you are. You change your life when you become comfortable with being happy here, even if you want to go forward. You change your life when you can love yourself even though you don’t look exactly the way you want to. You change your life when you are principled about money and love and relationships, when you treat strangers as well as you do your CEO, and when you manage $1,000 the same way you would $10,000. You change your life when you start doing the truly scary thing, which is showing up exactly as you are.

You declare to the world that you will not only love yourself when it sees you as worthy. You will not only have values when you have everything you could ever need. You will not only be principled once you get where you want to be. You will not only be happy once someone loves you. When you show up as you are, you disrupt this pattern. The goodness of life is no longer reserved for some version of you that you’ll probably never be. This was always a game for you to explain to yourself why it is you didn’t feel good naturally, before you knew how to start showing up and allowing your feelings.

You are showing up as you are today and taking what’s yours, not what belongs to some imaginary version of yourself. Not what you think the world thinks you’re worthy of. You, here, now. That is the true healing.

the universe does not allow perfection. Without breaks and gaps, there would be no growth. Nature depends on imperfection. Fault lines make mountains, star implosions become supernovas, and the death of one season creates the rebirth of the next. You are not here to live up to the exact expectation that you’ve mustered up in your head. You are not here to do everything precisely right and precisely on time. To do so would require stripping your life of spontaneity, curiosity, and awe.

There is nothing that you can do to win someone or something that is not meant to be yours. You can fight with everything you have. You can hold on for as long as you can. You can force yourself into mental gymnastics to pick apart signs. You can have your friends read into texts and emails. You can decide that you know what’s best for you and right for you. Mostly, you can wait. You can wait forever. What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. You can play games with yourself, you can justify and make ultimatums. You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion.

The truth is that what is not right for you will never remain with you. Though you might want to pretend that you don’t know if this is the case, you do. You can feel it. It’s why you have to grip so hard and with so little give. The things that are right for you can be free from you. You don’t have to convince them that they are right. You don’t have to line up the evidence as though you’re pleading your case.

Because the truth is that we do not want what is not right for us; we are simply attached to it. We are simply afraid. We are simply stuck in the assumption that nothing better will replace it, that its absence will open up a well of endless, infinite suffering for which there will be no solution. We do not want what is not right for us; we are just scared to let go of what we believe will make us secure.

Healing is refusing to tolerate the discomfort of change because you refuse to tolerate mediocrity for one second longer. The truth is that there is no way to escape discomfort; it finds us wherever we are. But we are either going to feel uneasy pushing past our self-imposed limits, breaking boundaries and becoming who we dream of being, or we’re going to feel it as we sit and mull over fears we fabricated to justify why we refuse to stand up and begin. Healing is going to be hard at first. It is going to mean looking at yourself honestly, maybe for the first time ever. It is going to mean stepping out of your comfort zone so you can leap toward the person you want to be. It is not what makes you more comfortable and idle. It is what conditions you to be more motivated by discomfort than you are scared of it, and inspired by your still moments more than you use them to forge the chains of worry. Healing is going to change everything, but it has to start with you being willing to feel what you are afraid to feel.