Heather

“Your identity does not have to be cohesive. Your story doesn’t have to flow. You don’t have to be neatly packaged in a way that other people understand. You have to stop living for your synopsis, the summary we try to piece together in our minds when we imagine people explaining us or evaluating who we are. It doesn’t have to make sense. You’re allowed to be great at a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to one another. You’re not limited to just one purpose, one talent, one love. You can have a variety of jobs, each of them meaningful at the time you have them. You can be good at a lot of things without lacking in others. You do not have to be a novel; you can be a book of stories.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“The ways in which your current situation—though perhaps unplanned or unwanted—could be the path to the place you’ve actually always wanted to be, if only you’d begin to think of it that way.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what you want, and then going after it, but in reality, you are psychologically incapable of being able to predict what will make you happy. Your brain can only perceive what it's known, so when you choose what you want for the future, you're actually recreating a solution or an ideal of the past. When things don't work out the way you want them to, you think you failed, only because you didn't recreate something you perceived as desirable. In reality, you likely created something better but foreign, and your brain misinterpreted it as bad because of that.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“You are your struggles. You say, “I am an anxious person” rather than “I sometimes feel anxiety.” You identify with your problems, which is likely a huge reason why you can’t overcome them.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think