STARTING OVER
Very recently, I had a bit of a meltdown. I felt stuck in life, I felt like I wasn’t where I wanted to be, and I felt like everything I was doing was just… wrong. Wrong enough to make me want to hit a reset button on life somehow. Or time travel, back to… I couldn’t even settle on an age. My twenties maybe? But what if it was too late? Should I go back even earlier? During my teens? Oh, please. Teen me wasn’t interested in what anyone had to say.
But I felt I desperately needed a do over. To start my life over somehow.
And then I started to wonder why I was feeling this way. What exactly had I done “wrong” that I felt a dissonance between where I thought I should be in life and where I actually was? I lay in bed, tracing back to every major and minor decision I’ve made for as long as I could remember. 1am became 2. And then 3.
I couldn’t find a single “wrong” turn or “wrong” choice. Every single decision I had made had been the logical choice. The right choice. At that time. All the factors at play made my decisions one of sound reason.
This includes the “bad” decisions I had made. Because they would later inform another decision or shape the way I approached life. I couldn’t find one thing I needed to change. Wanted to change.
The other thing I was kicking myself over during my meltdown was that I had wasted precious, finite time. That I should have done more in my teens or my twenties. Maybe that way I could be at a better place at 31 than I am right now.
But digging even deeper showed I had never really “wasted” my time – I’ve always tried to do the things I thought would bring me closer to my goals and the values I wanted to cultivate. Whether the outcome was favourable or not was an entirely different story. But the important thing was I did try.
Which means I don’t have a lot of “I wonder what that would be like” in my life simply because I was scared to try. Any for that matter. And then it hit me.
We are so harsh on ourselves for our failures and our losses that we forget success is temporary. Just like our failures.
In fact, ride that high of your success wave for too long and you start to get a little comfortable. You start to settle in your ways simply because it worked. Which evolves to become your comfort zone because why try something else when you already know what works? Why fail?
Next thing you know, routine kicks in, routine becomes the mundane, the mundane starts to feel like a rut and you’re feeling stuck in life yet again.
The truth is success and failure are self-defined. And so, perhaps feeling like you’ve failed so much you want to start over means it’s time to realign yourself with who you are and what you want in life.
No one knows the “right” path or the “wrong” path in life. You take chances. On what you think is necessary or important for you. Success isn’t guaranteed. And neither is failure. Whatever happens, happens. It’s just that it might not match the mirage that is your current definition of “good” or “success”. Stop looking at the outcomes, and start focusing on your efforts instead.
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