Brianna Wiest Quotes

The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.

We are meant to go through these periods of what some refer to as positive disintegration. It is when we must adapt our self-concept to become someone who can handle, if not thrive, in the situation that we are in. This is healthy. This is normal. This is how we are supposed to respond. But we cower, because it will be uncomfortable. It will not immediately give us the virtues of what we are taught is a worthwhile life: comfort and ease and the illusion that everything is perfect on the surface. Healing is not merely what makes us feel better the fastest. It is building the right life, slowly and over time. It is greeting ourselves at the reckoning, admitting where we’ve faltered. It is going back and resolving our mistakes, and going back within ourselves and resolving the anger and fear and small-mindedness that got us there in the first place. Healing is refusing to tolerate the discomfort of change because you refuse to tolerate mediocrity for one second longer. The truth is that there is no way to escape discomfort; it finds us wherever we are. But we are either going to feel uneasy pushing past our self-imposed limits, breaking boundaries and becoming who we dream of being, or we’re going to feel it as we sit and mull over fears we fabricated to justify why we refuse to stand up and begin.

No wonder why we build our own cages and stay in them, even though there's no lock on the door.

Unless you are a trained expert on the topic, any strong emotions that accompany your opinion on it are usually strictly personal (and therefore keep you away from being objective and realistic). It would take years and an extraordinary amount of research (at the level of Ph.D. candidacy) to be in a position to truly understand a nuanced issue enough to have an extremely strong feeling about it.

Guilt is often an emotion we carry from childhood and then project onto current circumstances when we felt as though we were burdens to those around us.

Our inability to perform is not based in fear or lack of skill, it is based in an inherent knowing that this is not what we want for our lives, and perhaps we’re feeling lost or unable to change our path.

Emotions are temporary, but behaviors are permanent. You are always responsible for how you choose to act.

And maybe in the end, the kindest possible thing you could do for yourself is to know that there is nothing that holds us back more than the important words that went unspoken, the deep instincts that went unfelt, the callings that went unanswered. Your life is reaching toward you, and maybe the kindest possible thing you could do is reach back.

When you choose to value having other people’s acceptance over your own, you accept a fate of battling your instincts to assimilate to the needs of other people’s egos. In the meantime, a world and lifetime of listening, leaning, allowing, following, perceiving, feeling, and experiencing…constantly eludes you.

What if, instead of believing that you have failed, you began to recognize that failure is just life’s way of moving you in another direction? What if instead of counting up all the times things haven’t worked out precisely the way you imagined they would or should, you considered that perhaps you were being led somewhere better? What if you found awe and reverence in the fact that there is a force so powerful protecting you — perhaps one you cannot even name or see or even believe in — that is refusing to let you have even the things you beg hardest for because there is something else you are so destined for?

Everything you lose becomes something you are profoundly grateful for. With time, you see that it was not the path. It was what was standing in your way.

For most people, the abstract fear is really a representation of a legitimate fear. Because it would be too scary to actually dwell on the real fear, we project those feelings onto issues or circumstances that are less likely to occur.

Relationships are not safeguards against loneliness. You can’t whittle yourself down to being as nice and accepting and likable as possible in order to ensure that as many people as possible won’t leave you. Relationships come and go; that is what they are designed to do.

Every conscious thought you have either circles you back into the mental cycle you’re in, or it liberates you from it.

Social media is actually making us more emotionally disconnected. Consistently consuming soundbites of people’s lives leads us to piece together a particular idea of reality — one that is far from the truth. We develop such anxiety surrounding social media (and whether or not we’re really living up to the standards expected of us) that we begin to prioritize screen time over real-life face time. As beings who require human intimacy (romantic and not) to survive, it’s becoming a more and more detrimental force in our culture.