When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

by Brianna Wiest

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. I mean the courage to accept that not every day is a good day, even when you...

Sometimes, it’s the one that you’re avoiding, resisting and running away from, because it’s the step that requires you to sit in your discomfort, metabolize your uncertainty, and do what you know you will have wished you did a few years down the line.

Because at the end of the day, almost every single one of us knows what the right thing to do is, the journey is developing the courage, bravery, resolve and willingness to do it again, and again.

It’s not about waiting until you feel ready. It’s about doing it anyway, and knowing readiness will come.

I mean that becoming yourself is a series of building and undoing, trying and failing, showing up, and sometimes, turning away.

I hope that you learn how to look at yourself and know that you aren’t quite the person you want to be, without condemning the person you currently are.

What feels so broken? And who taught you it was that way?

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 that you are also your own project, your own muse, your own love affair. I hope you learn you belong to yourself.

Life calls us to shed ourselves at different points in time. There is nothing we can do to avoid this — no dogma, no religion, no belief, no accumulation of belonging that could possibly remove this requirement from us.

Your life is about gently starting over, every day, every hour, in ways both subtle and disruptive, beautiful and melancholy, startling and expected.

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.