“. . .How did I get back here?” 

And you think you're tired. You're tired because you feel you've been doing it over and over. Picking yourself up, deciding what your priorities are, telling yourself this time it’ll be different, than trying everything in your power to make sure it doesn’t end as a failure. And maybe it’s true. Nobody ever seems to talk about how tiring it is to believe. To have faith in something that's been done repetitively with either the same result or something worse. There is a certain type of romance in the concept of starting over, talking about the ending as if it was a clean slate now.

(But most of us never wanted a clean state to work with constantly, did we?)

Sometimes we just wanted to keep what we had. We wanted the relationship to work, we wanted the job to last, we wanted the friend to stick around, we wanted the plans we had made to finally come true. But instead something happened and now many of us are picking up pieces and trying to figure out which pieces are worth putting together. That's the part nobody ever talks about when it comes to starting over - that you don't actually start from nothing.

You do start from what you have. What you have for the most part is what happened to you. Memories, fears, lessons learnt; be it harshly or with gentle guidance. You wish things had gone differently, or wish to understand things you still don’t.  You carry all these burdens from the past whilst starting fresh from a clean slate. Maybe that's why it’s not what most of us want. We know too much. The first time you took a risk and fell, you didn’t know if you would try it again. The first time you took a risk, you probably thought that trying was enough, but then you failed. So now you calculate, become more and more careful about taking steps forward with a cautious mind. You start to get tired of the process because, at the end of the day, it is one. You can keep starting over and over and over again until eventually starting over stops being an adventure and starts feeling more like punishment you're being handed for reasons you don't quite understand.

What it could be your starting over again and again is kept vague, because many of us have something different. Be it an artist trying to understand how they express themselves, or an office worker trying to get up in life through calculated planning. You make a prison out of what was at first a plan to achieve success. And at some point, thoughts start to fill in the corners of your mind when you're not distracting yourself.

How many times,

How many tries-

How much longer?

You want something to work, and be able to keep something close to you, create something that lasts. Something, anything. And it’s because we glorify resilience so much that we forget the basis. It’s a trait we praise people for in spite of how much they had to go through in order to keep doing what they're doing. You survived, but did you thrive? Did you adapt without sacrificing parts of yourself? You got through, but it was never an easy end. You may have felt a constant sense of loss that people felt when they saw others move on with their lives while you were still there, staring at the past. And the most painful things in my opinion? 

You wonder if you're the problem. 

Allow me to be the one to say, I doubt it. If it were just one person among a hundred, it could be said otherwise, but having to start over and over again, even over the smallest things, only proves that the problem is more than just you. It’s never that easy. Maybe life wasn’t gentle, maybe you didn’t get the help you needed, or relapse into habits you swore of. Eventually, you start to fear your own happiness, you can't let yourself grow too comfortable because you've learned that it refuses to last, you can't be too attached to something because you've had it taken from you once, and you spend the entire time preparing for the ending when the start is still happening. Refusing to live the moment to prepare for a future that’ll slip by. 

Isn't that another kind of loss - to have something good in front of you and spend your time waiting for it to disappear?

Call yourself realistic, tell yourself the hope that something will last is a joke.  But do not be surprised when you realize you don’t commit to something you’ve planned, because you’ve convinced yourself that the only way to survive an ending you’ve become familiar with is to never become too attached to a beginning. 

. . .Sometimes, starting over has to be something different.

It shouldn’t be about becoming someone completely different, just because the old version of you was the problem. Shouldn’t be tearing everything down and rebuilding it again; only for more flaws to show their face. Sometimes, it’s about going on. Taking what you get, learning from the mistakes, leaving behind things that serve you no purpose and moving on as long as you’ve learned your lesson. That, that is what makes starting again worth it. Starting over won’t erase what happened before, and many of us need to understand that. 

Perhaps that's something we misunderstand when we talk about starting over - the goal was never to forget, it was never to become someone who wasn't affected by the things that happened. It was just to get to a point where what happens next doesn't dictate anything. Maybe you will have to start over again, maybe life will take something else from you that you thought you would have forever, I can't promise you any of that won't happen. 

But for what it’s worth; the next time it does, I can only hope you look around and realize that, while you are starting with something new, you aren't starting with nothing.