The art of starting over
I read a quote on Instagram recently that said the biggest skill you can develop in life is the ability to reset fast. As a kid, you get five days to pout. As a teenager, maybe a day. As an adult, you’re expected to pull yourself together in a few hours.
Profound, right?
And I couldn’t agree more. There’s only so many times you can replay the same conversation in your head, rewrite what you should have said, imagine what they should have said, and somehow expect the ending to change. At some point, you have to accept what happened. Suck it up. Try again. Or take a different road entirely. Either way, reset.
But over the past few days, I’ve been thinking that maybe the quote left out one important part.
Resetting fast is only useful if you’re self-aware enough to understand what you’re resetting from.
Because otherwise, what are we really doing? Getting up, dusting ourselves off, and walking straight back into the same mess.
I think this is why we get stuck in our little trouble loops. We keep having the same fights, making the same mistakes, choosing the same kinds of people, reacting in the same ways, and then wondering why everything feels so familiar. We’re very good at “moving on” without actually moving “forward”.
And part of self-awareness, I think, is actually learning yourself. Not just the things you like about yourself, but the things that make you deeply, disproportionately annoyed.
I don’t like mess. I cannot stand people who don’t value their word. I have a very hard time with tardiness. If you tell me you’ll do something, I will probably remember that you told me you’ll do it. If you’re late, there is a good chance I’ve already had a small internal crisis about it.
Does that make me a difficult person to be around? Debatable, hahaha.
But I’m starting to understand that knowing these things about myself matters. Not because everyone around me needs to rearrange themselves to accommodate my preferences, but because I need to know what I’m okay living with and what I’m not.
There will always be things that irritate us. People will forget. People will be late. People will make promises they don’t keep. Some people will leave dishes in the sink like they’re waiting for a cleaning fairy to descend upon them.
The question is what I do with that information.
If I’m going to keep being around someone, maybe I need to talk to them about it instead of quietly building resentment. Maybe I need to understand that something I consider basic might not be basic to them. And maybe, sometimes, the answer is simply that I don’t want to be around people who make me feel like I’m constantly negotiating with my own boundaries.
That, too, is self-awareness.
And I don’t mean this only in relationships.
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Maybe it’s something with your parents. Maybe you keep having the same argument with your sibling. Maybe there’s a colleague who brings out the worst version of you. Maybe you’re the colleague who brings out the worst version of someone else. Sometimes it’s even a stranger you’ll probably never see again, but somehow you spend the next three hours mentally prosecuting them.
Resetting is great. But what did you learn?
That question has been sitting with me.
I think there’s a certain humility in admitting that you got something wrong. Not the kind where you beat yourself up for days, but the more useful kind. The kind that says, okay, that didn’t work. What part of this was mine?
And then comes the harder bit: not taking the exact same road next time.
I like thinking of it a little like software. You build something, you release it, people use it, things break, and you fix them. You don’t look at version one and say, “Well, I built it. Good enough.” You keep iterating.
Maybe we’re supposed to do that with ourselves too.
Not become entirely different people every time something goes wrong. Just slightly better versions. A little less defensive here. A little more patient there. Maybe better at saying sorry. Maybe better at leaving when we should. Maybe better at staying when we should. Maybe finally learning that the thing we kept calling “bad luck” was actually a pattern we had a hand in creating.
I sometimes think every relationship we have deserves its own little report card. What went well? What didn’t? What did I learn? What could I have done differently?
I sound like a Product Manager desperately trying to get everyone into a retrospective meeting, oops!
But perhaps that’s what self-awareness really is. Not endlessly dissecting yourself until you find something wrong with every little thing you’ve ever done. Just being willing to look back without getting stuck there.
We don’t get to be interns forever.
At some point, we’re supposed to earn our little personal promotions. Not into someone perfect, thankfully. Just someone who knows a little more about themselves than they did last year.
There is no self-development without self-awareness. You can read as many books as you like, but if you’re unable to read yourself, you’ll never learn a thing.
Reset quickly, yes.
And hopefully, somewhere between all the resetting and starting over, we become a little more familiar with ourselves. I’m still learning what that looks like. Some days I think I’m getting there. Other days, I’m clearly still on version 1.2!
The real challenge will always be to figure out what to carry into the next version of ourselves, and what to leave behind.
When I think about some of the things I’ve gotten wrong, I wish I could go back and sit beside the younger version of me for a while. Not to change anything, because she was doing the best she could with what she knew then, but just to tell her that she would eventually understand some of it. She would still make mistakes, still get hurt, still occasionally choose the wrong thing with complete confidence. And maybe that’s okay. I don’t think I’ll ever become the person who gets everything right, and perhaps accepting that is one of the kinder things I can do for myself. There is still so much I don’t know, but I like the thought that the woman I am ten years from now will look back at me with the same tenderness.
