Checkpoint

The idea of a fresh start is great. A clean slate. The opportunity to learn from the past and grow.

But I am 29 and this is not the first fresh start I have had. In fact, every time I do not like the story, I choose to try again, to rewrite. I have even moved halfway across the globe to completely change my narrative. For me, a fresh start is not just a beginning-of-the-year list of resolutions I intend to keep yet never do. It is a daily quest to figure out who I am and create a new reality to shirk the responsibility of facing my previous attempts which I have deemed unsuccessful. And I am growing tired of it.

You see, a year ago, I abandoned my safe (and slightly stifling) job, I handed back the keys of my cute (but small) apartment and I said goodbye to my friends and family before starting my 32 hours long journey into the unknown. This was the freshest start I could imagine for myself. I remember crying for two hours straight on the plane because it felt like I was moving to Mars, and fears of never being able to get home kept me up during the entire flight. In a way, my fears were justified as I am now (happily) stranded in Australia, where life is relatively normal, but the situation back in Europe makes it impossible to know when I will return. Which means I am now stuck in limbo, torn between enjoying the joys of travelling and the apprehension of not knowing when and where I will return to settle. It is forcing me to face all preconceived notions of what a 29-year-old should be doing with her life. While my friends back home are having babies and buying houses, I live with a bunch of 20-year-olds, juggling three different jobs to save enough money and resume my exploration of this country. To once again abandon the work, the flat, the people and go who-knows-where to live off hostels, shared rooms and instant noodles.

So, I know what a fresh start is. I have had 7 or 8 in the last year. Every time I did not like where I was, I would change the location, since I had no obligations to anyone or anything. Every time life threw a curveball, I had to adapt, reinvent. One of my fresh starts involved moving from Sydney to a rural town of just over 1 000 inhabitants and work for three months on a farm. I would pack bananas by day and go back to a dingy and overly expensive hostel by night. It was different from anything I had ever experienced before, and it showed me how resilient I could be. On my first day there, the city girl that I am squealed at a single cockroach pattering around the kitchen. By the last day I was unwillingly but calmly sharing my room with several of his companions, a few wasps, colonies of ants and a bandicoot that enjoyed rummaging through my bin for leftover cookies. Every day, I pushed my body to its limit with the intensity of the work, and my mind with the unpleasant living and working situation. Going through this experience and not giving up is one of my proudest achievements of 2020. Only a fresh start could have opened me up to this opportunity which I never would have encountered if I had stayed in the comfort of a lukewarm middle-ground.

But it is exhausting to start over and over. Sure, the more you do it, the easier it gets. You become more and more capable. You know how quickly things can happen for you if you remain open to the possibilities. You even learn to thrive in unsettling environments because you know they are the perfect breeding ground for unexpected beauty.

You also never build anything strong. It all feels so fragile and unstable. All that we use as bearings in our more sedentary lifestyles are subjected to constant changes. The people you know and surround yourself with could decide to leave the next day for a new life across the country. The boss you have could decide to fire you because you are a backpacker and that is pretty much the worst crime you could commit, regardless of who you are as a person. Your landlord could kick you out for similar reasons. It could also be rainy season and you did not come Down-Under for the grey skies and the flooded streets. Therefore, you move, thinking that a fresh start somewhere else could be good. That all the things you wanted to do but have not done are possible somewhere else. The grass must be greener on the other side.

You move but here’s the thing: you are still you and changing where you live will not rid you of your insecurities or your blocks. You grow, yes. You also flee. A lot. Situations, relationships, places. As soon as something is not to your liking, you drop everything, slap a “fresh start” label on the whole experience and hope for the best. We become less and less accountable for the things we do because we can leave quickly and easily. What we are can disappear in an instant every time we go through one of those fresh starts. The truth is it sounds like the erasure of the past self in order to create a different, seemingly better version of the “me” and escape the things we do not like about who we are.

Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe the problem is not the fresh start, but the meaning it has in my mind. As if every fresh start must be the death of my previous life. And the ushering in of a new one where everything must be perfect because otherwise the fresh start feels kind of pointless? Maybe that is why I am so tired of it. Every time I start fresh, I kill the parts of me that I do not like and put immense pressure on myself to make the new story as meaningful as possible because otherwise I shattered my life for a disappointing outcome, and this perfectionist is not here for it.

Therefore, I am not sure I like “fresh start” because of its unspoken destructive undertones. It sounds like getting killed in a video game and going back to the previous checkpoint, rich with the knowledge you acquired of what not-to-do during that previous life you just lost. We do not have the luxury of going back and replaying until we reach the best version. We can only go forward and accept the imperfection of who we are and what we have created.

I guess this is my lesson for 2021. Finding my own version of a “fresh start” that feels better and that has less drastic implications. So that in this context of uncertainty and permanent change, it can be less daunting, allowing me to appreciate every day without feeling like I must tear down everything in the name of starting new.