When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

by Brianna Wiest

We are here to witness our souls in action, we are here to bring the world within us out into the world around us.

When it feels most like nothing will ever give and the mountain ahead of you won’t ever be scaled, remember how you crossed every one that’s behind you: one step, one hour, one moment, one glimmer of hope at a time.

Deep down, you know you’re moving on, and you can’t do so with all of the weight of the past keeping you stuck.

You’re realizing that you’re worthy of the life you want, and you have always been.

Periods of transition can be tough, but when you’re really ready, you’ll know how to let go with gratitude, and step in with grace. What this means is that you’ll be thankful for everything you’ve experienced, including each misstep and mistake. From each, you learned something invaluable, and for that, you won’t really regret it.

We aren’t often given a lesson on how to be fulfilled. We aren’t often told what to do if we don’t quite get there when everyone else does, if our big milestones are letdowns, or most commonly, if we check off every box on the list and find that we are, somehow, still empty inside.

Sometimes, we have to take the back road because the long way around teaches us what we need to know.

Sometimes, we sit in our own pain for years before we start waking up and adjusting our behavior.

Your acknowledgement that self-destructive behaviors are bad for you is clouded by the fact that they bring you comfort, which you convince yourself means it is, somehow, justified.

Getting honest with yourself is the best form of self-protection there is. Give that to yourself, and go forward with faith, with knowing that you can trust yourself, because you are no longer going to lie to yourself—even if the truth is inconvenient.

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.

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.

It is believing in our potential enough to choose better. It is caring enough about ourselves that we decide we’re going to stop accepting a life that’s less than what we deserve. It is fighting for who we are, and who we might one day be.

We arrive here because we can’t remember the last time we felt good about our bodies, because we’ve had the same relationship problems for years, because the negative thought patterns that have been eroding us are finally holding us back just enough that we know it’s time to let them go.

That impossible feeling isn’t actually impossibility. It’s your honest feelings finally surfacing because you are now strong enough to respond to them, and to heal.

No matter how hard it seems, just know that when your feelings seem as though they are crescendoing and everything is worse than ever, you’re probably being set up for a releasing, an awakening, a reconciliation, and the start of the next chapter of your life.

Your purpose is a role you play, firstly, to yourself. It’s the relationships you have. It’s the way you care for others and they care for you. It’s how you exchange love, it’s how you bond with some people, and break with others. It’s not what you do, but the way you do it. Day in, and day out.

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.

I know that sounds so counterintuitive, as though purpose is exclusively selfless. The reality is that to be overflowing with love, we must first fill ourselves up with it. We must first come to a place of knowing before we can share wisdom. We must first know connection before we can connect. Everyone you admire, who has guided you and loved you into who you are today, did just that.

Your first purpose is just to be here. To be weird and ordinary and exceptional. To think and feel and know and wonder. To build yourself into a person you are proud to be, even if nobody else is clapping for you.

We become purposeful as we realize that since the very moment we were born, we were overflowing with potential to extend that love in every direction we can reach.

You start to let go the day you take one step toward building a new life, and then let yourself lay and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need. You start to let go the day you realize that you cannot continue to orbit a black hole in your life, and going on as you were before will simply not be an option.

Detachment is a sign of maturity, the prioritization of our future selves and our long-term well being. Detachment teaches us how to love ourselves first. It teaches us how to be resilient. It is a sign that our goal in life is no longer just to remain comfortable. It is the greatest display of self-love. Detaching from a relationship when we know it isn’t right is a sign that we no longer rely on others for our sense of stability and self, and it is often the first sign that we are more mentally strong and emotionally free than ever before.

These are the questions you want to ask yourself to build your own mission: What is it that you want to feel each day? What do you want to be most proud of by your life’s end? What work do you want to do each day? How do you want to be remembered? How do you want to impact others? How comfortably do you need to live in order to feel whole? Where do you want to spend your days? What do you want your relationships to be like? What do you want your bank account to look like? What do you want your closet to look like? What do you want your home to look like?

Be free enough to decide who you are and what you really want.

You’re going to be happy and hurting and healing, all at the same time.

Sometimes, befriending ourselves is the most important step of all.

In nature, nothing transforms without breaking first. Flowers can’t bloom until they’re deeply, wholly rooted. Seasons can’t turn until the cold has come and killed off the remnants of the past. Butterflies don’t spread their wings before being cocooned up in isolation for weeks, and stars don’t become supernovas before facing their own implosion.

You cannot hate your way into a life you love. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.

Just because you can empathize with someone’s pain does not mean their burden is yours to carry. Just because you see someone struggling doesn’t mean you have to martyr yourself to fix it. Just because not everyone around you is thriving does not mean you have to hold yourself back.

To be successful is to live on your own terms, to find satisfaction in each day. That’s all. Anything else you acquire on top of that is just gravy. It’s not the point of your life, it’s not a prerequisite for joy.

Either way, you are a whole and complete individual that exists outside of other people’s perceptions. If you live believing that you’re merely the sum of the way you are seen by others, you are going to have a very empty life. Be alone for a while — intentionally. Discover who you are when nobody else is around. Discover what you like when nobody else is there to tell you what to like. Discover what you want when nobody else is there to tell you what you want.

Discover how you live when nobody else is there to tell you how you live. When you know who you fundamentally are, on your own terms, you end up shifting the way that the world sees you. Instead of acting in accordance with other people’s expectations, you start living up to your own.

You do not lose relationships, you outgrow them. There’s no code that says every person you come across is destined to stay in your life forever and ever. In fact, very, very few people will stay with you throughout the duration of your time here.

You will be different. Relationships will come into your life

and they will run their course and they will change you in some important way and then they will pass.

You come into this world alone, and you leave this world alone. Those you meet along the way, however temporarily they remain, are only here to guide you to be more at peace with yourself.

Eventually, you have to realize that the biggest challenge in your life was the state of your own mind. Whether or not it allowed you to enjoy what was in front of you, whether or not it joyfully prepared for the future while savoring today, or whether or not it seized you up and made you feel paralyzed in the face of the unknown.

You were taught that your natural instinct is wrong, and that if you started really listening to it, you’d completely let yourself go. This is how societal conditioning works. It relies on you believing that your fundamental self is filled with malice, and that only your self-hate is holding it all together.

When parents or guardians overcorrect, they do so in an effort to avoid connecting with an authentic version of you that makes them uncomfortable (most likely because their own parents reacted similarly to them). Instead, the problem is placed on you.

You either don’t know how to connect, or don’t trust connection.

The root of overcorrecting is not feeling good enough. You don’t need to try to force yourself to stop the over-correcting behavior — you just need to teach yourself that you are enough.

1. Reconnect with your honest opinions. If it’s too hard to figure out how you really feel about yourself, start small. Try new foods and see whether or not you like them. Listen to a new Spotify playlist and decide whether or not you like it. Watch a movie and assess it honestly. Don’t think about whether or not someone else approves of it, just focus on how you feel in your body, heart, and mind. When you start to reconnect with your honest opinions in small ways, you will repair your instincts.

2. Pay attention to your most basic instincts. Notice when you are hungry, thirsty, or tired. That’s it. Just make a note of when you’re either one of those three things and, when possible, give yourself water, food, and rest. These survival instincts, unfortunately, get turned off in the overcorrecting process. How many people do you know who are dehydrated, hungry, and exhausted most of the time? Probably a lot. Start honoring the instincts you know you can sense, and then respond to them accordingly.

Instead, if you start supporting, appreciating, and validating people for who they are, how they look, and what they are doing, that grace will naturally extend back to your own life.

People around you projected issues they had with themselves onto you, and then you adopted them as your own. Someone said: “I’d never wear that,” and you took it as: “I shouldn’t, either.”

Remember that when other people judge, it’s a projection of an issue they have with themselves, in the same way that your worst judgments of other people are projections of issues you have with yourself.

When we accept ourselves exactly as we are, something pretty magical happens: We transform into everything we possibly could be.

And if you do want to fix something? Do it from a place of self-respect, not a place of wondering whether or not you will be able to convince the people around you that you are good enough for your own life.

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.