Starting Over

For anyone who has come to know injury, there is no heavier truth to hold within your body than the weight of disconnection. There is a solemnity in grief, often unspoken and held so sensitively in isolation, that yearns for connection. But as with many deeply held truths, we must reconcile within the interiority of our being what it means to ready ourselves to exhale outwards, and begin to speak again.

How else can you start over without bringing one chapter to an end and starting to write the next? To all those narrators out there, looking to make sense and meaning of their lives, I see you. I am you.

Do not be fooled, this is grief work. At the death of one thing—be it a job, a relationship, something as abstract as possibility—exists the birth of something new. But first, there is the liminal state one must fall sweetly into in order to germinate. This takes time. So much, yet so little (in the scheme of things). But for the one immersed in a life of in-betweens, it can feel like an eternity.

I am ever curious to know, how many times must one start over? Physical relocation, new beginnings, career changes, the end of friendships, gender transitions, leaving a religion—each of these marks significant events and shifts in the lives of millions of people every year. But how much time do we dedicate, do we muster up within ourselves to turn towards the discomfort of what has died, what is no longer in us, or for us?

Speaking only from my own lived experience, I can answer this question simply, in one word. Countless.

But ever curious still, I wish we perceived transitions with the same tenderness as physical injury. Tending to, caring for, possibly bandaging up, creating salves for healing to happen, and giving (and trusting) a person with the medicine of time. Never expecting this to happen quickly or slowly. Never putting pressure on something to happen, or someone to arrive sooner than they can. And never finding fault or laying blame for the scars left behind, atop a life that is meant to be lived—free from the judgment of others, free from the judgment from self.

Easier said than done.

Instead of looking at transitions as personal failings, what if we simply offered ourselves the medicine of grace? What a world it would be to live in that normalizes false starts as life’s way of welcoming greater alignment. Though it may not seem that way in the moment, if you have ever been in spaces of misalignment—in locations, among people, or in a body that you couldn’t make a home in—then you know what I mean. And I feel this with you here.

Perhaps starting over is a lopsided term. Were it over, starting, what a call to action that would be. Over, welcoming grief—a celebration of a life well lived. Starting, ushering forth the energies of beginning. Not again. Just beginning.

No matter how life has challenged you or the ways you have felt injured, marking it as an end and resourcing yourself in a way (or a great many ways), so as to feel some level of resolve, is the sensitivity that lives here. Maybe in so doing, it frees you, as you exhale from the experience that could no longer hold you. Where an end precedes the beginning, even in the ways we grieve and create peace around what has happened.

What hope.

And I trust that I will “over, start” as many times as needed to feel more like myself, doing what I love, in the safety and privilege of me.

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