You're Not Starting Over, You're Starting From Experience

TL/DR: Everything you've lived, learned, survived, and outgrown is coming with you. You're not starting over, you're starting from experience. There's a difference. Use it.

This week on Wait, we met Heather Lacy. Two days after her layoff, Heather - who had spent 20 years leading teams of 600 people in healthcare - stood in front of her mirror and didn't recognize the person looking back at her.

She had sat in every single one of the 300 layoff conversations when her organization downsized, looked each person in the eye, and owned the message even though it wasn't her decision. She showed up. She stayed in the room.

And then, on a Friday afternoon, her boss wasn't even in the room when it was her turn.

Just like that, the title was gone. The team was gone. The identity she had been building since she was 19 years old, gone.

She didn't tell her friends or family for the first few days. The shame was so heavy.

Standing at that mirror, she thought she was starting over.

She wasn't.

Most of us have a complicated relationship with starting, even when it's our choice. Fresh starts, blank slates, new beginnings. We make vision boards. We buy the planner. We are fully in our reinvention era.

And then we're actually in it, and it feels a little like failure in a trench coat. Like we're standing at the beginning of a road we could have sworn we already traveled. We should be further along by now. Like, again? Really?

But here's what I want to offer you today, especially if you're in some version of transition right now: You are not starting over. You are starting from experience.

And those are not the same thing. Not even close.

What "Starting Over" Gets Wrong

Starting over implies erasure, that everything that came before, the years, the effort, the lessons, the relationships, the versions of yourself you had to outgrow (RIP, emo Meghan), didn't count. That the canvas is blank.

The canvas is not blank.

You know things now you didn't know then. You've developed instincts you couldn't have had without going through exactly what you went through. You have taste, discernment, and a level of self-knowledge that only comes from actually living - from trying, from failing, from pivoting, from surviving things you weren't totally sure you would.

And here you are.

That's not nothing. That's everything.

The person starting from experience moves differently than the person starting from scratch. They're not naive about the work ahead. They're not thrown off guard by the hard parts. They've already met some version of this before and they're still here, willing, and curious enough to try again.

That is not the posture of someone who failed.

That is the posture of someone who learned. There's a difference, and it matters.

Why It Still Feels Complicated (And That's Okay)

Like most things worth doing, it's messy. Something real is ending, even when something better is beginning. Even when you're excited, like genuinely, can't-sleep excited, there can be grief sitting right next to it, taking up more room than you'd like.

That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. That's just what it feels like to be a person navigating actual change, not just the highlight reel version of it.

You don't have to perform certainty, and you don't have to downplay all the things you've learned and earned that have gotten you to this point.

If You're Open To It…

Think about something you're beginning — or about to begin — that has that "starting over" feeling to it.

Now ask yourself:

What do I know now that I didn't know when I started the last time? What did the previous chapter teach me that I'm bringing with me? What do I actually want to leave behind? How is the person beginning this next chapter different from the one who began the last?

If this resonated, share it with someone who's in the middle of a beginning.