The Dilemma of Starting Over
When is the best time to restart your life?
The easy answer is now.
The harder truth is that now often comes wrapped in fear —the fear of letting go of what you’ve cherished so far, fear of stepping into a world you don’t yet understand. Overcoming that fear is no easy task.
For me, that restart came in the post-lockdown world, when the “new normal” was still a question mark. When OpenAI had just been released to the public, and in real life, I was at the beginning of my own integration into something new.
My life swerved in a completely new direction. From instructor to learner. From grading to being graded. From facilitator to participant. From home to home-away. Restarting meant unlearning, relearning, and carrying the weight of decisions that felt both terrifying and exciting.
Learning the Rhythm of a New Culture
Even though I thought I was prepared, the impact of cultural shock was tremendous.
I grew up in India, where I’d say organized chaos is at its best. Life there is a daily improvisation with no manuals or guidebooks, just a shared rhythm that everyone somehow understands.
Moving to Canada felt like stepping into a world of learned order. Even walking had a system I’d never thought about: keep to the right and overtake from the left. At first, it felt distant and rigid. Then I discovered the ease that structure provides, and I began to see the beauty in both: the beat of chaos and the calm of order.
It was also a lesson in how deeply some values are ingrained. My legs twitched involuntarily every time a professor walked into class, as if to stand up in respect. My throat tightened at the thought of addressing them by their first name. I rerouted conversations just to avoid calling my seniors informally. Once, I even began a sentence with “Yes, ma’am ” before catching myself mid-word. My supervisor only smiled and said, “First names are just fine.” I nodded, biting my tongue in embarrassment.
And then there were slang and spellings. I once paused halfway through an assignment because I couldn’t decide if it was center or centre. Five minutes of Googling later and still confused, I rewrote the sentence just to avoid the word altogether.
All these small frictions made me realize what I had always taken for granted — how much I had to rewire myself to adapt to the new path in front of me.
From Teaching to Learning
The hardest transition, though, was professional. All I knew were classrooms, lessons, and grades. I left behind a role as an assistant professor and a PhD student to start over as a master’s student in an industry-aligned program.
Get Michael Anju’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
“Why?” many people asked me.
It was a risky trade in my 30s, in an unstable job market — giving up security to gamble on a future I couldn’t see yet.
The answer was simple: I had begun to feel the yawning gap between academia and practice. I wanted to close the distance between what I taught students about being “industry-ready” and the reality I felt disconnected from. So I went back to school.
The shift forced me to relearn theories and concepts from a different cultural perspective. To rethink assumptions. To start again.
I invested my savings and time into learning and bet on a new direction.
The outcome? It made me deconstruct my identity.
Who am I without the titles I carried so far?
What can I rebuild from the pieces I already have?
The In-Between
Honestly, this is the most uncomfortable phase of my life. I am no longer a teacher, not quite a student, and haven’t yet found my career curve. Just someone in between — sending applications, hearing silence, juggling bills, struggling with Illustrator tools, and asking late-night what-if questions in a journal.
But it has also pushed me into places I never thought I’d go. I found comfort in writing down the fiction stories in my head, in learning design by practicing (not just watching), and in returning to books.
I am finding small courage to fight the fear. To let go of the old humility that made it easy to stay invisible — the “it’s not that hard, no big deal, I didn’t really do much” attitude. And to try a different kind of humility: the one that comes from showing my imperfect self to the world. Believing that done is better than perfect.
This piece itself is proof of that.
Growth, I’ve realized, hasn’t come from clarity. It has come from discomfort.
A Window for Growth
Starting over is not easy. It hasn’t given me clarity. What it has given me is motion. Do my days feel uncertain? Yes. But they also feel alive. I have stopped waiting for the perfect conditions to act and started moving anyway, even if the steps feel clumsy.
The truth is, restarts are never clean, like in the movies where the heroine packs her bag, moves to a small town, and everything magically aligns. They are messy, uncomfortable, and full of second-guessing. But they also shake you out of autopilot and make you notice the small things again — the way you greet an elder, the way you spell a word, the way you see yourself without old titles.
I don’t know where this restart will take me. But I know this much: comfort never taught me what discomfort has. And maybe that’s enough to keep going.
