When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

by Brianna Wiest

If you’re willing to believe that something might be possible for you — it already is.

There are very few choices in life that we can’t amend or at least adjust as we go on. The world does not punish us for choosing one thing over another, we punish ourselves out of fear and desire to conform to the most simple, unchallenging path.

did not arrive here to grit through the experiences other people have chosen for you, but to eventually decide upon your own.

You can feel what you feel without letting it compel you to burn everything down. You can witness, simply observe.

When you start stepping forward in your full truth, give people a chance to respond to you instead of just assuming how they’ll react.

You know it is only ever in solitude that we extract the most important truths about our lives. Without the expectations of others around us, we get to see who we most essentially are.

Connection is the free-flowing state of sharing presence with one another, and more people would want to connect with you than you’d probably assume. Connection is recognizing that even when life hands you a season of aloneness, you are never completely disconnected.

People used to move on from old towns and groups and friends, catching up now and again, but generally reserving the intimate details of their lives for those who grew in alignment with them. This is healthy because it gives us space to find new identities instead of being stuck trying to appease all the different ones we constructed, that have come together all at once, to witness how we are today. We feel most alone when we are strangers to ourselves, and in a world where everyone is watching, we are more pieces of what they would want us to be than the whole of what we want to become. We don’t know where we fit because our ideas of ourselves are bound up in expectations. We have different faces for different people and somewhere throughout the constant pressure to be something else, we lose something. Our true selves.

Acceptance is the first step to healing because until we see our circumstances for what they are, changing them becomes impossible. Even if your acceptance looks like you admitting that you’re in a crisis and you need help, that’s still progress, because you’re so much closer to receiving it as opposed to where you would be if you remained in denial.

In fact, we often find that the things that irritate us most are the ones that are pointing toward an issue in our lives that we need to work to resolve. If we are constantly stressed about finances, then financial health needs to be something we strategize and prioritize.

The most important journey of your life is not the one where you find the willpower to press forward with a life you do not truly want, but rather, to dare greatly, to lay it all on the line, to step over the horizon, to leap and trust that the road will rise to meet you.

You may believe that it has been your rational mind that’s gotten you where you are today, but it’s truly been a thousand unknowns that have come to life, little feelings that you followed despite everything that told you not to, little urges that were calling you into an entirely different world—one you could not yet see, but inevitably knew would be true.

It may have taken you a while to see clearly, but your heart has known the entire time. The question is not will you follow it or not, but how long will you wait until you be...

This is why people preach from the gospel of “Love Yourself First” so often: when two people who are happy, well adjusted, and pursuing their own individual goals get together, the relationship lasts. When two people who need self-work get together, they use one another as a Band-Aid, and then it falls apart because ultimately, they realize: another person is not a solution.

You need to get up, you need to start over, and you need to begin anew. You need new places, people, and routines. You need new adventures and goals and plans.

This is how you get over anything: you fill your life with so many powerful, world-altering things that slowly, over time, you begin to think about them less and less. Not because you’re trying to, but because you have so many other things to think about now. You have so many places to go, things to hope for, and passions to keep your mind consumed.

It is never the right time until it is the right person.

The journey isn’t about convincing yourself that you’re enough, but loving yourself even if you aren’t.

Whether you realized it or not, the time passed. Without you having to even try, joy emerged from your days. One day, something small brought you a little ease, and then a little more. You waited. You realized that everything was going to be okay, even if it doesn’t always feel okay. You let the waves crash, and then you let them recede.

Whether you realized it or not, you became resilient. You explored the perimeters of what your heart could hold, and how much it could process. You discovered that your strength is limitless, you just don’t know what if it’s never been tested before.

The life you have today is a mere dream of the past. The things you do right now were once the things you only could have ever prayed to have. The people in your life are the ones you gazed out the window for years and wondered if they would ever arrive, if someone would ever show up that made you feel so deeply understood.

You found yourself, not because you were searching, but because you were cornered. When discomfort in life peaks, we are left to look around and wonder why. Through that reflection, we discover all the pieces that are out of place, and then we find the courage to put them back together.

What would my best self do today?

Please stop fighting battles you cannot win. Please stop trying to shop your way into self-esteem. Please stop trying to convince people to love you when they have no intent to. Please stop worrying about problems you can’t solve. Please stop arguing with people who don't care enough to hear you out.

When you try to argue with people who have no intent of hearing you, you are fighting a battle you cannot win. No, of course you don’t want to give up on anyone, but eventually you have to realize that all of the stress and energy you pour into trying to convince someone to think a way that they refuse to—even if it would be better for them long-term—is just your own energy wasted. If someone isn’t willing to change, they aren’t going to change, and nothing you say or do will amend that.

Being kind to yourself is often doing the thing you least want to do. It is very often prioritizing your future needs over your current wants. It is awakening yourself to your destructive habits, it is recognizing your self-defeating patterns, it is learning how to self-heal, it is setting boundaries first with ourselves and then with others, it is recognizing our power and remembering how we have neglected to use it. That is kindness.

If you are afraid of not having enough money, your desire is financial freedom. If you are afraid of losing love, your desire is healthy, stable relationships. If you are afraid of not having done anything important with your life, your desire is finding purpose in your work, and in your days.

Every time you interact with someone, you are creating a cascading, ripple effect through humanity. You cannot imagine how deeply this web of connectivity is woven, how much a single act of kindness can affect the world at large, how powerfully one soul showing another true love can impact the way that person interacts with every other person they come across—forever.

You start to let go the moment you realize that this is the impetus, this is the catalyst, this is that moment movies are made about and 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.

Most people begin with what habits and routines they want to have each day, as opposed to what habits and routines they would need to start doing to get them where they want to be in five, 10 or 15 years down the line.

This is something called reverse engineering: you have to understand what you want the final product to be before you’re going to be able to set all the parts in place to make it happen.

You’re going to be happy and hurting and healing, all at the same time. You’re going to see places you never thought you’d see, and still find yourself gravitating to the old ones you thought you couldn’t get away from fast enough. You’re going to accomplish feats so big and brave you never even dared to dream of them, and you’re going to wrestle the same tiny demons that have followed you your whole life. You’re going to meet someone who makes you feel more at peace than ever before, and they’re also going to shine a bright light on every part you’ve tried so hard to hide.

Our most profound advancements are only made possible by the willingness to try, and to fail. When we have nothing to lose, we have everything to gain.

Becoming is not glamorous. It is not fun. It requires diverging from the easy path, leaving the safe trajectory, risking everything, trying anything.

What the world needs is more people with good hearts holding a torch down the paths least taken. We need to prove to each other that happiness is possible, abundance is at our fingertips, and we are allowed to savor every magic moment of our lives.

We do not need more people holding themselves down because of the world's aching. We need more people proving it’s possible to dance in spite of it.

Consciously designing our lives can become a form of escapism. It lifts us right above our lived experience to a place where we believe we haven’t quite landed yet, so we haven’t really begun. We start to get the idea that we can put ourselves on pause, that we can save up all of the goodness we seek for a later date, when we are better, when things are clearer, when we’re better aligned.

It is courageous to begin, but most people get stuck again when it’s time to simply continue.

The reality is that you probably already know what the next right step in your life is, you just have to find the courage to take it. I don’t mean the courage to leap, endeavor, or try something entirely new. I mean the courage to wake up every day and stick to the plan. I mean the courage to face your demons moment-to-moment. I mean the courage to do what’s less gratifying in the moment because it’s what’s right for you long-term. I mean the courage to keep going, even in spite of your failures, even though you’ve messed up, even despite the fact that you very well might do so again. I mean the courage to embrace your humanness.

It is not that your life can never be exciting, just that most of us are under the unrealistic delusion that everything must be a peak experience all of the time. This leads us to a process of constantly uprooting, which is the self-sabotaging behavior of planting seeds, sprouting them, and then starting all over again.

I hope that you learn how to gently start over.

You are not supposed to get it all right the first time, you’re just supposed to keep trying until you do.

I hope you learn that loving is much like life — it takes everything and gives everything back. And merging your life with someone else’s is the greatest honor you’ll ever get, so I hope that you learn how to bend, not break, how to compromise, not take, and how to appreciate, not assume.

I hope you learn how to gently dust yourself off and begin again, because life is too short to stay stagnant, life is too full to only drink a quarter of the glass.