What we reach for…

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.

“How you move forward is what you begin to reach for in their place.”

Brianna Wiest

Wiest’s entry today is about repetition; more specifically, the peculiar human habit of returning to the exact things we have already identified as harmful. Her argument is that change is not found in the dramatic moment we finally put something down, but in all the ordinary moments afterwards when we choose not to pick it back up. It is not the leaving, but the continued leaving - the quiet, repetitive decision to stop returning to our own familiar unhappines…. which sounds simple, but, if like me, you know it's not.

Humans are peculiar little creatures! We return to the same unhappiness simply because we know where the light switches are - familiarity disguised beautifully as safety. I think we spend too much time telling people what to stop doing - Stop overthinking, drinking, going back to somewhere, someone that makes us unhappy. Stop sabotaging yourself. Stop being anxious. Enlightening stuff, eh? I’m sure nobody has ever considered simply not doing the thing.

But we talk far less about the empty space left behind - you cannot just remove a coping mechanism, a pattern, a place, a person, a thing, and expect the space to remain politely vacant. Something will always move in, the question is, do we choose it consciously, or simply hand the keys back to familiarity?

Perhaps moving forward is less about becoming someone entirely new and more about learning to interrupt the reach - understanding why your hand keeps travelling towards the same things, and to place something kinder there instead.

It is why projects like ⁠You Define You interest me. Its new app was built specifically around men’s mental health and mindset, with structured reflection and tools aimed at anxiety, burnout and overwhelm. For men who are often given the spectacularly useless instruction to “talk more”, perhaps we also need to give them somewhere practical to begin. If you want to have a look, sign up through ⁠the You Define You website for a discounted price on the app -

• https://youdefineyou.org/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZnRzaAS-V6xwZG9mAmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDzEyNDAyNDU3NDI4NzQxNAABp4eF1ZsyhVLns5dV4Jdyam0BdUzIfYkZNNZjsoVsxF8sEoIkLSM0BCAAmKYW_aem_OVxWiMn1pvvjiA_L2sOR7A

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t putting something down - It’s teaching your hands a new direction.

---

Photo & poem

My hands remember 
what my heart has outgrown,
old hungers sleeping 
softly in the bone.
Still, somewhere between 
the leaving and the return,
I am learning the strange 
grammar of enough.
Perhaps healing is not 
an empty hand,
but knowing what is 
worthy of its touch.

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So, I'm heading to Italy tomorrow - 10-day break. I will not be taking my laptop! See you on the other side lovely people!

CJ