“They say you can always start over like you’re some IKEA shelf that just needs to be disassembled and reassembled with a new set of screws. But what if I told you I’ve been repackaging the same emotional chaos in prettier wrapping paper since 2018?”
There’s a certain romance in the idea of starting over. New year, new job, new journal, new gym membership you swear you’ll use this time. We tell ourselves this is it the big break from the past. The tabula rasa. The emotional Ctrl+Alt+Del.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth I learned while sipping overpriced coffee in a city I moved to in hopes of finding myself:
We rarely start over. We just rebrand our pain and hope nobody notices.
The Myth of a Clean Slate
I’ve had multiple fresh starts. Each one felt like a grand declaration. A haircut so short it shocked my mother. A deleted WhatsApp chat history. A move across cities. A LinkedIn update that screamed “New chapter!”
And for a while, it worked. I felt shiny. Lighter. But eventually, the dust of the past settled on this “new” version of me and I realized I’d simply repackaged my issues in more aesthetic fonts.
We call it healing, but sometimes it’s just emotional Photoshop.
