“I Want to Start Over, but I Don’t Know Where to Begin”
“So much has changed. Or maybe I’ve changed. Either way, the life I’ve been living doesn’t feel like mine anymore. I know I can’t go back, and I don’t want to fake it through the rest of my time here—but I have no idea what comes next. I want to start over. I just don’t know how to begin something new when I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
Dear Reese,
That feeling—wanting to begin again but having no idea where to start—is one of the most disorienting emotional places a person can live in. It’s not quite grief, not quite excitement, not quite despair. It’s a slow-burning ache, a quiet unraveling of a life that used to fit but now feels too tight, too scripted, too far from something that resembles your truth.
There’s no shame in wanting to start over. In fact, I think it’s one of the bravest things a person can admit. Not because it’s easy—but because it requires you to look at the life you’ve built and tell the truth about it. To stop pretending it still works. To stop performing the version of yourself that once made sense but now feels misaligned, drained, or painfully false.
But where people get stuck is in this space you’ve so honestly named: I don’t know where to begin. Because the life you want next doesn’t have a blueprint. It’s not waiting for you on the other side of a single decision. It’s a whole ecosystem of choices, identity shifts, and quiet, invisible steps. And when you’re already exhausted, or emotionally raw, or carrying the weight of past roles, it can feel like trying to navigate an entirely new city with no map and no language.
Let’s pause there for a moment.
Because before we talk about “how” to begin, I want to speak to what it means to even want to start over.
That desire doesn’t come out of nowhere. It usually follows something tectonic—an event, a series of slow losses, a cumulative awareness that you’ve drifted from who you are or what matters most. Sometimes it’s prompted by burnout. Other times by loss, aging, endings, or even an inexplicable sense of internal deadness. But whatever its source, it comes with a whisper: This isn’t it anymore.
That whisper can be terrifying. It calls into question everything you’ve invested in—your career, your relationships, your choices, your image. It can make you feel ungrateful, erratic, or foolish. But the truth is, most people don’t start over because something was wrong. They start over because something was true, and they finally stopped ignoring it.
And now you’re here. Awake to the truth, but unsure of the path. That’s not failure. That’s the beginning.
So where do you begin?
Not with a plan. Not with a list of goals. Not with some romanticized idea of “reinvention.” You begin with presence.
Because the first step to becoming someone new is making space for who you actually are right now. That includes the version of you that’s confused, tired, lonely, hopeful, searching. That version is not a problem to fix. It’s the seed of what’s next. If you bypass it, if you rush past the discomfort and leap into action, you risk building something new on the same scaffolding that broke you in the first place.
So take inventory. Not of achievements or benchmarks, but of truths. What no longer feels like home? What relationships, habits, routines, or roles feel like costumes you’re tired of wearing? And on the other side of that—what brings even a flicker of life back into your body? What thoughts or moments feel light, honest, unforced?
Sometimes starting over doesn’t mean demolishing everything. Sometimes it means quietly shifting the center of your life back into alignment with your inner world.
And yes, that will mean loss. Even when the change is right, it rarely feels clean. There will be moments when you second-guess everything. When nostalgia tries to seduce you back into something comfortable but wrong. When fear whispers that maybe you were never meant for anything more.
That’s part of the middle. That’s where most people turn back.
But if you can stay in that discomfort just a little longer—if you can resist the urge to fill the blank page too quickly—you’ll start to notice something: desire doesn’t return all at once. It returns in fragments. A conversation that feels like oxygen. A subject you can’t stop reading about. A part of yourself that feels more alive around certain people, places, or questions.
Follow those fragments. Don’t demand they form a full picture. Just let them lead you a little further away from what hurts and a little closer to what heals.
You might not have a name yet for who you’re becoming. That’s okay. The name will come later. The clarity will come later. But the shift has already begun.
And here’s the part I don’t want you to miss: starting over doesn’t mean erasing your past. It means carrying it differently. With honesty, with softness, with less shame. You’re not leaving behind a broken life—you’re honoring the version of you who built it with what they knew, and choosing now to build something new from deeper soil.
You don’t have to know what’s next to begin again.
You just have to trust that your longing for more is not a mistake. It’s a signal. A compass. A quiet declaration that your life is allowed to change when your truth does.
This is the beginning.
–RJ