When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

by Brianna Wiest

Life contracts before it expands, and pulls back before it leaps forward.

Our healed selves are not our most flawless selves. They are not immune to sadness or grief or fear. They are just not controlled by those experiences any longer.

You are far from alone in hearing the call to wake up from the life you had planned in order to commit wholeheartedly to the life that has been waiting.

Actually, things are really right, which is why you finally feel safe enough to feel what you really feel. Stop projecting. Stop telling stories. Those dull, unsettling feelings are not in the future—they’re in the past. You’ve been carrying them with you all this time.

Though you cannot change time, you are, somehow, changing your story.

What if instead of thinking that your life was meant to unfold seamlessly, you realized that the courage it takes to keep opening doors, even if they all close, is all part of the process?

What if the journey is really asking you to love a flawed person, so you might be able to love your own flaws the same way?

What if you believe that there’s something wrong with the way you look because you’ve spent an excessive amount of time fantasizing about how light and free perfection would feel?

What if cleansing your mind with hopeful, joyful, positive thoughts is the rebalancing that’s been long overdue, after so many years of existing solely within the most negative interpretations you could come up with?

What if, after an entire lifetime of being sold the idea that the point of your life is to exist as perfectly as possible, you could now open up to the notion that perhaps you are, instead, here to enjoy the ride while you’re still on it?

Stop having hard conversations with people who don’t want to change. Stop showing up for people who are indifferent about your presence. Stop prioritizing people who make you an option. Stop loving people who aren’t ready to love you.

The most precious, important thing that you have in your life is your energy. It is not your time that is limited, it is your energy. What you give it to each day is what you will create more and more of in your life. What you give your time to is what will define your existence.

When you realize this, you’ll begin to understand why you’re so anxious when you spend your time with people who are wrong for you, and in jobs or places or cities that are wrong, too.

Make your life a safe haven in which only people that have the capacity to care and listen and connect are allowed.

When it’s time to start over, you won’t know you’re at the start of a new beginning, because all it will feel like is an overwhelming end.

You will have to build a home no matter where you are. You will have to decorate and settle and reach out. You will have to find rhythms and routines. You will have to be vulnerable, and you will have to be seen.

It’s time to start over, and it’s time to begin right here.

We cannot keep running in circles and expect our lives to blossom, we have to stay where we are and have the courage to heal what’s broken within us before turning to yet another outside source to mend the damage.

We heal when we learn how to adjust how we show up, not how we change what we show up to.

The point was never that you adjusted everything around you until it was made perfect, but that you adjusted the way you see everything until you realize that it is enough, and it always has been.

This has existed within you all along. It’s been waiting for you this entire time. You just had to find the courage to choose it, and sometimes, that means not giving yourself any other choice.

If you don’t believe you deserve to feel good, you’ll limit your capacity for experiencing good things. If you’re not used to life being easy, you’ll make it hard to anchor yourself back down to what you’re familiar with.

Real growth requires genuine exploration, a period of trial and error. It requires you to first admit that you might not know what you want.

Through this, we inch closer to what it is that actually makes us feel best, not what appears best or “should” be right from the outside looking in.

Negativity bias limits us not because we aren’t able to be realistic, but because we don’t understand that positive outcomes are often more likely than worst case scenarios, they just aren’t as emotionally triggering.

and you’re absolutely going to realize that it’s often far more exciting and thrilling to decide to totally uproot and start again than it is to simply stick with the path day-in and day-out.

The love you desire is one you create with someone who is as equally willing to expand with you as you are with them. We do not lose love when we lack passion, we lose it when we lack any further potential for growth.

Watch your peers. See what those around you are doing. Notice how many artists are creating and building businesses born of their passions. Watch how many writers are crafting poems, how many coaches are leading their clients, how many classes are selling, how education is moving, how art is being purchased and displayed.

If you are looking for permission to do what you love, if you are seeking the confidence to pursue what you would like to spend your days doing, what you are really asking for is whether or not you are good enough to be worth people’s time. So know this. People want to hear stories that sound like their own.

They want to see outside of them a little piece of what’s within them, and the only way you can create that for other people is to pull out a sliver of your soul, and put it on paper.

We can create to heal ourselves, and extend that healing outward.

You will have to say goodbye to certainties. Five year plans, regular paychecks, easy explanations about what you do. The things that make people feel less fear, but not more alive.

You are going to have to care. You are going to have to believe in your vision until someone else does. You will have to hold a torch for yourself first.

There is no merit in holding back, nothing gained but a life half lived.

We did not come here to arrive at death untouched and unmoved, precisely as we were at the beginning.

We can either embrace people for who they are in this moment or decide to limit the presence they have in our lives.

When we can’t let go of the past, it’s often because it doesn’t feel safe to. Without hypervigilance, we assume the threat will be free to come up and surprise us again.

When you realize that your words, your actions, and your beliefs deeply impact not only your reality but the realities of those around you, you start taking yourself a lot more seriously.

Some event made you realize that you can’t always predict what’s next.

In place of acceptance, you’ve put hyper-vigilance.

You’ve spent your days mulling over the details, tracing and dissecting the events and how they started and ended, back to front and front to back, again and again. You’ve observed and you’ve found patterns. You’ve psychoanalyzed. You’ve become wholly consumed by the offhand chance that this disruption might arise again, and in that consumption, you’ve lost your will to press forward.

Healing is to accept hurting as part of being human. Healing is to carry on anyway.

When you are ready to take your power back, it probably won’t come from an inspired place of sound resolve. It will come from sheer desperation, a final battle cry. It will arise from your last ditch effort to save your own life.

And that part of you — the one that really wants to protect you? Maybe that’s your power speaking in a different way. Maybe that’s not a sign that you’ve abandoned yourself, but that you love yourself enough to safeguard whatever small parts of your heart remain untouched.

The path forward is understanding that we are sometimes collateral damage to people’s own inner wars, and that we do not need to adopt their weapons as our own in order to fight back.

Stop only seeing your life through other people’s eyes.

If nobody else was around, or would ever know anything about your life ever again, how would you live?

Thinking that you’re so out of the ordinary is holding you back, because it makes you believe that what you’re doing is unpopular, and therefore, unsafe or wrong.

You’re special, but you’re not alone.

It’s not just what would feel good now, but also what you’ll thank yourself for later.