The After
Join me as I stumble my way through Brianna Wiest's The Pivot Year. She'll bring the wisdom; I'll bring the commentary, the scepticism, and the occasional existential wobble.
The Pivot Year - Day 9
“Everything shifts slowly until all of a sudden, you are standing firmly in the after.”
Brianna Wiest
In this entry, Wiest writes about the promise of the ‘after’. For those of you who have not read the book, the ‘after’ is an idea that whatever pain we are standing in now will eventually recede, and that when it does, we will emerge different, altered… probably wiser, likely more discerning, and a lot less reckless with our choices and our hearts.
On the one hand, I feel that there is something comforting in believing pain is quietly doing renovations while we are busy surviving it; however, on the other, I think we have romanticised pain a little… We like to name it, give it a job description… We tell ourselves that pain will teach us, strengthen us, make us more resilient. But, even as a devout optimist, I think that sometimes, pain is just what it says on the tin.
Sometimes it doesn’t arrive carrying wisdom or a beautifully bound moral alongside your suffering... Sometimes it simply rips things apart, moving through the rooms of you, opening every cupboard, leaving the lights on, and disappearing without so much as putting the kettle on.
But Wiest’s ideas around the ‘after’ are interesting… Somewhere between surviving something and remembering it, we begin to rearrange ourselves… We may not even notice at first; it’s quiet, almost imperceptible… We might cease providing excuses and stop explaining, and we become more protective of our time and less careless with our hearts. Over time, the things we once tolerated begin to itch.
Perhaps pain doesn’t transform us at all; perhaps it simply creates a space where we are forced to meet ourselves without all the furniture, and only then, slowly, carefully, we decide what gets carried into the next room.
The ‘after’ is not who pain made you, it’s who you chose to become when pain had finished taking things away.
Photo and poem
Pain is a peculiar kind of weather, it takes the roof and leaves the windows open. We stand amongst the wreckage, naming what remains, surprised by the things we no longer reach to save. The storm does not decide who lives here next, only what can no longer survive the weather.
Love
CJ
Thank you for doing this series. I will probably not read her book, but I am enjoying taking it in through your examination of it 😊