Brianna Wiest

1. You don’t take your 20s seriously in an effort to ‘make the most’ of them. Despite the overwhelmingly popular notion that your 20s should be a throwaway period, statistically and biologically, they are the single most defining decade of your life.

We aren’t used to being happy.

You learn yourself with age. Your movements become less clanky, you know to pack Tylenol in your bag because you always need it after a three hour flight.

A world travel map with pins.

Living with a ghost, crafting an idea that you need to hold on to – to fill a space or insecurity with – is using the idea of someone to fix something about yourself.

Second chances. Third chances. Forgiveness. The ability to say: thank you for that experience, and mean it.

Make more time for people than you do things.

Take yourself out to dinner.

The most important thing you can spend your time investing in is understanding what your instincts feel like.

Now we realize the people who most effortlessly “fit in” were only the ones who were most willing to sacrifice themselves. Now we realize that being “cool” wasn’t a desirable thing, not the way we defined it — but we saw no other choice.

We are so caught up in being the person who cares less, that we become afraid of even caring at all.

“When you step into a library, all the knowledge in the world is before you. When you wake up each day, all the possibility in the world is too. You choose whether or not you just see books. You choose whether or not you just see another day.”

SPONSORED There are so many things we identify with, so many ways we decide who we are based on style that we admire and opinions that are the collective average of the people we surround ourselves with.

“A lack of intimacy is not distance from someone else, it is disregard for yourself.”

We can relive and re-experience social pain more vividly than we can physical pain.

As an individual who both listens to Yeezus while writing essays about the Universe and seriously capitalizes that word, I feel most qualified to share with you the common ground between poets and prophets like Nelly and 50 Cent and…

We expect complete honesty from others, and yet when that ‘honesty’ is something we don’t want to hear, it’s ‘mean,’ and when it’s our turn to tell the truth, we avoid doing so until there’s no other choice.

Letting go does not mean you are accepting defeat, or admitting your unworthiness.