Who Asked? // Can we ever really have a fresh start?

I don’t know about you guys, but I left myself a massive mess for myself when I went home for winter break. Basically, every item of clothing I have was thrown in a pile on the floor, and my desk and chair were covered in assorted towels, trash and makeup. I remember thinking to myself, “This is future me’s problem,” and envisioning that I’d come back from winter break rejuvenated and excited to do four loads of laundry and clean my whole room. 

I was teeing myself up for the perfect fresh start — clean clothes, clean room, new year, new me. I’d be more motivated than ever to do my classes, sign up for yoga sessions, drink lots of water and finally clear up my skin. I’d start a weekly planner and maybe actually meal prep for once. Hell, I was even going to start meditating and doing my “Mindful Self Compassion” workbook.

Now, I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise when I tell you that I have not found myself doing all these things and have instead found myself wracked with panic that I’m going to catch the stomach bug going around. The laundry is much more of a burden than an exciting opportunity, and instead of feeling like I have a fresh start, I feel like I’m two days in and already drowning. 

Now, to be fair, perhaps I wasn’t setting myself up for success by leaving a ton of chores for future me to do. But what could I have done differently? Is there any way to truly have a fresh start? 

The concept itself sounds so appealing. I’m sure at some point in all our lives we’ve found ourselves longing to start over with a clean slate, and maybe we tried. We cut off all our hair, moved across the country for college and ghosted the toxic people in our lives. It feels good to solidly mark a new era, promising we can be different — we can let go of the parts of ourselves that hold us back and build shiny new habits. 

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to ever truly have a clean slate. It’s a fantasy to truly leave behind the experiences and people that shaped us, and if we had our memories totally wiped we wouldn’t be us anymore — or capable of basic tasks. 

Granted, this doesn’t mean that we can’t get close, and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in trying. From something as big as moving to a new city to something as simple as clearing all your tabs, we can have a million little “fresh-ish” starts every day. 

The important thing to remember is to manage your expectations. It can be disappointing to create this idealized new version of you or your life just to realize that the year changing doesn’t suddenly make finding time to go to the gym easier. Even if you alter everything about yourself and leave everything behind, there’s no true “starting over.”

Instead of being disheartened by this truth, remember the upsides. While you can’t completely escape what’s happened to you, you do get to choose how you react to it moving forward. Especially by utilizing tools like therapy, you don’t need to be held down by your past. Instead, you can use it to build the person you want to become, choose how you process the things that have happened to you and challenge the negative beliefs and habits that keep you in this moment. In a sense, it’s beautiful that we can’t completely reset ourselves at any given moment, because otherwise there’d be no growth. There’s a difference between nurturing a seed and just replacing one plant with another when the first one wilts. 

Another aspect of starting over that so many of us forget is that you don’t need a new year or a new home or a new haircut as an excuse to try and be better. While it’s nice to have that physical indicator of change, waiting for the perfect moment can hold us back. Maybe change starts on a random Wednesday simply because you have the energy to write down a list of what you have to do before the weekend. 

Believing in the concept of a truly fresh start is keeping us from the beauty of slow growth because we’re waiting around for the perfect bolt of lightning transformation. We want to be good at everything overnight. It’s harder to admit the necessity of slow change, of picking up one or two new good habits at a time, because it feels like it’ll take forever to be where we want to be. 

Let’s all try to relish where we’re at and the little progress we’re making all the time instead of letting ourselves stay in bad mental spaces and unproductive spirals because we weren’t able to have the clean slates we wanted. We will never have that perfectly clean slate. People are messy and always will be. 

My return from break doesn’t look exactly how I want it to. I haven’t gone to the little shop I meant to visit, I haven’t meal-prepped feta pasta for the week, I haven’t signed up for any workout classes. I didn’t eat a real meal until 4:30 today, I still haven’t showered, and I’m dealing with the same panicked phobia that I’ve been struggling with for years. But I did four loads of laundry. I wrote this piece. Hell, I even have high hopes that I’m going to put my clean clothes away instead of leaving them in the basket for days. 

Change doesn’t happen immediately, and growth is slow. Maybe I’ll try being proud of myself for the little wins instead of beating myself up for not transforming into a Pilates princess the second I stepped back on campus.