Alchemy of the Self : How pain became purpose, and clarity became her compass
Brianna Wiest is one of the defining voices of our generation when it comes to emotional maturity, creative awakening, and spiritual resilience. Through viral essays, bestselling books like The Mountain Is You and The Life That’s Waiting, and a deeply empathetic lens, Brianna has invited millions of readers to look inward—where all true transformation begins. With a background in journalism and a gift for piercing clarity, she has redefined the self-help genre with nuance, depth, and soul. Her work is not loud, yet it reverberates through the lives of women (and men) seeking something real in a world addicted to surface.
Brianna’s presence is a quiet revolution. She speaks the language of healing without pretending to be healed. She teaches detachment without denying love. And she reminds us that self-sabotage is often self-protection in disguise. Her vulnerability is her power, and her writing feels less like advice and more like sacred permission. In this rare and intimate conversation with GOSS, Brianna opens up about the layers beneath her work—what she’s still unlearning, how she channels her writing, and the quiet truths she’s discovered in her own healing process. What follows is not just an interview—it’s a mirror. For anyone standing on the edge of change, Brianna’s words offer a compass back to self.
[Unedited full conversation begins below. All words are Brianna’s, only edited for clarity and punctuation.]
You’ve written that rock bottom is a beginning, not an ending. Can you take us back to your own rock bottom and the first flicker of light you found in that darkness?
When I imagine it in my mind, it’s not one moment, it’s many. And I think that’s probably more true for not so many people. I know that there are people who do have this moment where their whole lives cave in on you. But my experience was more through my own life and processing. And no matter what I have been going through–whether it’s financial issues, whether it’s breakups, whether it’s mental health–there always seemed to be this point where everything felt hopeless and I just felt like I should give up. My experience with emotional pain and discomfort has always been that it has this eclipsing effect where you almost can’t see anything else or you don’t know that anything else exists or that becomes like the totality of your reality. I do believe that we are generative, creative beings. And I believe that we are meant to participate and have a role and a hand in shaping who we become and how we become it and what we create within this world. I don’t believe that we come here to be passive all of the time. I do think there are times for surrendering, allowing, trusting. But more than that, I think we’re supposed to be active participants. I think that for most of us, because we did not grow up or at any point generally learn how to do that, learn how to use the machine that we are– It’s we’re flying these planes and nobody taught us how to work the control panel. It’s like, we’ll just stick it on autopilot and then move. That works until it doesn’t. And then I think that the journey of every single one of us is coming into a greater and more nuanced understanding of our relationship, firstly with ourselves, but then how that being interacts with everything around us. Imagine when you’re dancing with a partner in a ballroom. You understand that you’re not stepping forward the entire time. You give and you take. You ebb and you flow. You’re guided and you lead. There’s a time for each action, each movement. And the quiet wisdom of knowing when it is time for what is what I’ve gotten the most stuck on in my life.
Have you always trusted when to move or when to step back?
No. Something that I say a lot and I mean it is that I am, by nature, not an emotionally intelligent person. It takes me a few extra steps to be able to organize emotions. I notice other people do it with a little more effortlessness. And what I once thought was a weakness or a negative, I now think of as a gift. That’s what I had to figure out over time. This thing that I feel like is something wrong with me, what if it’s something right with me? If this came so effortlessly to me, if this was as effortless as an exhale to me, and I didn’t have to stop and think about it so hard– For the people that don’t have to stop and think about it, nothing would prompt you or evoke anything in you or inspire you to write about it or to share it with others.
In The Mountain Is You, you explore the concept of self-sabotage being a form of self-protection. What is the hardest truth you had to accept in your own life before you could write that book?
You know what, that question made me immediately want to cry. There were reasons, unconsciously, that I didn’t want things to go well for myself. I was playing a role in the patterns of my own life, and there were reasons why I did not want to be successful or maybe even okay in some ways. I think that every single one of us has to accept that in some way at some point. To even acknowledge and then surrender to it, and then say, “All right, what do I do with this?” But there were reasons that I didn’t want to be successful, or even okay.
What does your writing process look like? Do you channel it, plan it, or simply let it flow?
It’s a mix. I will tell you some cool things that will happen. I will see that maybe five or six people will post the same quote or the same page, all at once, out of nowhere. I will know that that is the cue for myself to share it with some additional thoughts as well. And when I see that I always say, “Thank you. I see.” And you know, these are people that don’t know each other. They don’t know that at the same time and at the same moment, this is registering and resonating like waves all at once. This is one of the most incredible things I have gotten the chance to witness throughout my journey–and to see it from behind your own two eyes is honestly almost surreal. When I was first writing, I’m talking about things that I’m dealing with in the quiet of my own life. I’m in my studio apartment, trying to just sort out my life–the most vulnerable things that I’m thinking and feeling. At the time, it felt like I’m the only one in the world. And then to see how many people from all over the planet, people who I would otherwise probably have little to nothing in common with, reach out to me where I meet them and they’re like, “It was like you drew a map of my mind. It was like you were speaking about my experience.” It makes me emotional, honestly, talking about it. I have almost out-of-body experience of how alone you aren’t. You don’t even know how alone you aren’t. Whatever you are going through, I promise you, there’s not just one other person who has been through probably the exact same thing. There’s, I bet you, many. And you realize that you can figure it out too. It was this huge validation process where I was like, “Okay, all right, can I dig into this more now, and can I even take it a step further?”
Many of your essays speak to the part of us that’s afraid to want more. How do you personally reconcile ambition with contentment?
I think that the way we experience a day is the way we experience our lives. I think that the way we meet the little things is the way we meet the big ones. And so the way that we learn to practice on the little things, practice letting go of the little things– If you are someone who practices letting go of someone cutting you off in traffic, you are strengthening the letting-go muscle for when it’s time to let go of something bigger in your life. It’s a skill. All these things are skill sets. It’s this beautiful coexisting truth of this moment that is all we have. All we’re ever meant to do is everything we can with everything we’ve got. And I believe that we can arrive at this moment and be overcome with gratitude and recognition for all that we have while still not denying the natural essence of our beings–which is productive, generative, forward-thinking and creative. And I actually think that they’re one in the same. Because I noticed that when people aren’t content, they’re also usually not creative. We often think that it’s one or the other. Do I just appreciate what I have or do I want for more? And usually, people who appreciate what they have naturally are in the process of continuing to create and become. It’s an inhale, exhale, kind of thing. It’s like you’re in the flow of life, kind of thing. Versus, are you stopped or are you in your own evolution? Which is where I think we all need to be.
Has your relationship to pain changed as your platform has grown? And do you still write from the womb or has it evolved into writing from the scar?
The process is the same in that I always have to write just as the wound is about closed. And then I usually don’t share it until it’s into that scar phase. If I write about it any sooner than that, I don’t have all the information. I can take notes and observe, but I haven’t gathered all I need to gather. It’s right that the last note of the song is the moment where I’m like, “Okay, no, you need to write this down because you have so much clarity and so much recognition.” I always say I could never write The Mountain Is You again. I also would never want to. But the part of me that was reconstructing and reconfiguring itself through the process of writing that book, I couldn’t go back there. And I don’t want to go back there. It’s finished now. So that also motivates me because it’s when it is in that final stage of the wound healing, I know that’s the moment to speak to it. And then when it’s a little sealed up, when it’s in that scar, I can send this out now also from my own health and wellbeing because it’s not so active anymore. I can see it with more neutrality and let others have their experience too.
There’s a quiet power in the way you speak about boundaries, detachment, and emotional sobriety. What does emotional maturity look like for you today?
I think that people imagine healing as this perfected state where you’re happy and productive and well all the time. To me, it’s about emotional flexibility. And it’s about reclaiming the full spectrum and bandwidth of your feeling states. When it is time to grieve, you can grieve. When it is time to be sad, you can cry. When it’s time to be angry, you’re responding appropriately. Then also when it’s time to be elated, you can experience joy. When it’s time to be grateful, you’re grateful. When it’s time to be happy or to be forward-thinking, you’re able to reach that too. I think that we don’t get to just turn off our feelings in one direction. If we numb ourselves out in one way, it just numbs us out all over. And I think that’s why sometimes when we reach these cusps of big breakthrough moments, sometimes also then the floodgates open and we’re filled with fear, regret, sadness, and it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, why is this coming up now? This shouldn’t apply now.” Well, because you’ve regained access to a degree of your emotional capacity. You’re going to process things that have been latent and dormant for a while.
Do you ever stop feeling that?
I think it’s like cleaning your house. If you live in a house for decades and you never cleaned it or never cleaned it well or you didn’t know how to clean it, that first go around is going to be a heavy lift. There’s going to be a lot to do. There’s going to be a lot to sweep up. I think the goal is to get to a point where you’re cleaning your house on a regular schedule so it’s not that there’s not cleanup, but it’s just a little bit more balanced and a little bit healthier. And then sometimes there are things like when your roof starts leaking, and that’s not a matter of whether you were cleaning or not. That’s just life. Things happen. It’s how you respond to it and care for it, and how you move and what you do with it that informs what your experience of living in that house is.
You’ve helped redefine healing as nonlinear, sacred, and messy. How do you protect your own peace while holding space for the pain of others through your work?
I’m on a book tour right now, so I meet a lot of people. I have had to learn to be able to bear witness and acknowledge and validate, but not absorb. And to know that me taking this on will not lighten the burden. But if I do that for all 500 people that I meet at an event, it will incapacitate me. It’s not that you can’t empathize or understand. It’s a deeper discernment that this is not mine. So even if I am with you at this moment, when we part ways, I have to be able to return to my own center and not keep carrying it. And it’s not even when I meet people in person, it’s also messages I get. People reach out all the time, and share the hardest things of their lives and also the most beautiful things of their lives. I’m so grateful that they feel comfortable enough to do that. That’s such an honor to me. And I know that for me to continue to be there for them, I also have to practice my own emotional hygiene.
Do you return back to nature or do you return back to certain things to ground you and bring you back to center, especially when you’re touring?
Nature. I’m an outdoor person. I’ve lived in the mountains and I’ve lived in rural areas. I’ve lived in cities as well. I mean, I enjoy everything, but in terms of what brings me back to my clarity and wholeness is just hibernating, nesting. It’s not even that complicated, just being able to have any quiet time that I can take to be by myself and organize my thoughts and process. Also, being outside and being put in a place of awe that I don’t understand but I feel so connected to it. I do think nature has this incredible purifying effect on people.
What is a belief that you once held tightly that you’ve now released, and what did that shift make space for?
That I have to do it all. I had to do it all or be at all. There was a time when that was true. Like, if this is going to get done, I have to be the one to do it. There is a truth. But there’s something more true now, which is that it’s not about me being effective at every single imaginable task or responsibility. It’s also me being able to have the discernment of what to hand off, and then hand off and trust that someone else can take care of it. So again, it’s back to that freeing up the space for me to contribute. And just because you can doesn’t mean you have to. I used to do this thing and I will still fall back into the pattern of it if I’m not mindful, which happens all the time. But I won’t stop until I’m at the point where I have no choice but to stop. I mean, where I’ll just keep going because I can just take it, until I’m exhausted or about to be burnt out. Then I have to realize–again, with the house thing–what if I cleaned my house before it was a huge mess? What if I started cleaning it up in real time? We know that we have to wash our clothes and cook our food and move our bodies. We seem to not come so easily to the realization that we also have to clear out our minds. We also have to organize our feelings and perceptions.
Do you have these non-negotiables embedded in your routine?
This is an obvious one, and it feels silly to say, it’s journaling. It’s always been my thing. I’ll do it a few different ways. Sometimes I like to junk journal, which is what I call just venting. Sometimes you just need to get it out. And then a lot of other times, I will be responding to my own self to outline and gain clarity on what I’m feeling. There’s this exercise, seven layers deep, where you start, “This is what I’m feeling or experiencing.” And then you’re like, “Why?” And then you just keep going down, like seven layers. And usually around the seventh why and answer, you have something to work with, you get to the root of it.
Which one of your books or essays feels most like a mirror of your soul, and why?
They all do, in different ways and for different reasons. My essays, every piece in there when I wrote it was an experience that I was having, and writing it was this amazing moment of clarity and breakthrough. Then The Mountains Is You was such an unbelievable experience. It was exhausting, but amazing. But I think the most accurate reflection is my recent one, The Life That’s Waiting. It feels like this cumulative piece. It makes me emotional to look back at it. It’s all of the questions that I had when I was younger. I know the experiences that I journeyed through to arrive at those conclusions. And to see it all together, it instills in me this feeling of purpose.
Do you also have pride when you look at your work?
Sometimes. Usually, I’m just shy. I feel embarrassed sometimes. You just pour your heart out then everyone’s looking at you. I feel proud that I had the courage to even try. Looking back like my first books, I’m like, “Oh, I see where you’re going with that.” But I can’t even feel worse about it because the courage it took at that age to try something like that–even if it was terrible–the fact that you tried and then kept trying, that makes me feel really proud.
You once wrote that your new life is going to cost you your old one. What part of your old self did you grieve the most in the process of becoming who you are today?
The part of me that continuously wants to settle. It’s back to that contentment and growth question. If all we ever experience is contentment and we just stay where we are, we let everything settle and we don’t have any forethought of what we could create or build or become next, to me, that feels kind of depressing. I just don’t want to spend however much more of my life I have not using it. I don’t like thinking about that because it freaks me out. Do I just wait to die? I don’t like that. And then the part of me that’s like, you can have all of that nurturing, that comfort, that beauty, that rest. But you can also reach toward the sun, you can also grow toward the light, you can also get excited for a new idea. You can also try again, it’s not over. Life is this dance and this balance between those things. It’s the inhale and the exhale that keep us living. I truly believe this. There’s a part of me that’s like, I just want to give up. And that’s valid. It’s okay to feel that way. I think we don’t have to turn that into hyper productivity. But we also don’t need to suffocate that. I think our natural state is somewhere in between those two.
What are you currently unlearning even now after all the self work?
That the plan I have or the future I see is the best possible one that could be. I’m learning this at all times, actually. I could be moving in the direction that I think is the greatest vision I could have and I could turn a corner and Life could say, “Put that down.” I’d be like, “Wait, what? This was my biggest dream.” And Life would take my hand and turn me around again and say, “Look at this huge glowing horizon. This is where I was taking you all along.” And the thing that I wish everyone could think about–because this was told to me so many years ago and it changed my life–if you could come up with the biggest dream you have for your life and scale up by 10, it would still not even come close to what is actually possible for you. And do not let anyone or anything tell you otherwise. The only gauge of whether or not you are where you’re supposed to be is you. You trust you. You trust your instinct. You trust your heart. You know what you feel. Believe in yourself.
Is there a time or a moment that you remember in your journey where you had that gut feeling of “This is what I meant to do?”
I was a journalist for a lot of years and I wrote articles. I loved it. I wasn’t at this point that I’d seen other people get to where it’s like, “I hate my work, I have to quit.” It was not a push. It was like a pull. It was like a call. I can’t explain to you how I knew this, but there was a moment where I felt like, I’m supposed to leave everything I’m doing and just write books. You have to understand the layers here. There was not one clear path or route there. I had to sit and think about it. I was like, well, my work is my work, then this is my love and my passion product. Do I want to combine the two? And I was like, I have to because it’s the thing that makes my whole being come alive. And now, comparing the two, there is no comparison. It’s like giving 5 % of myself versus giving 95 % of myself. That’s the difference of what it feels like. There was nothing I was looking at outside of me to be like, oh, yes, this is how this will work. I just knew. I was like, I don’t know how it will work but I know that I need to figure it out.
If you could tattoo one sentence on every reader’s heart, what would it say?
The moment it feels like everything is coming apart is the exact same moment when everything is coming together, you just don’t know it yet. Every time it feels like some part of you is dying, it’s that a truer, more whole version of you is being born in that exact moment. And if your eyes are set on what’s leaving, you are going to miss everything that’s coming in.
Do you have any last words or words that you’d like women of our magazine to retain when they think of Brianna West?
I hope every woman that reads this thinks and knows that the limit of what they can be is artificial, and to not allow it to be imposed on them. And that they get to say what the whole being who they are looks like, and not to let the world make you feel like you can only be one thing. When you’re at the beginning, you’re afraid of moving forward because you think it’s only going to get harder and harder. But if you’re doing your best to live in integrity and follow your heart and do it right, it gets easier and better. Don’t let the fear of moving forward prevent you from doing so. The stronger you get, the stronger you are. The better it gets, the better it is.
