How do you start over?

Nov 9

This is the question that is on my mind when I wake up. It’s still the question when I brush my teeth in the morning. When I brush my teeth in the evening, it will still be the question on my mind.

I suppose one place to start is the admission that my world around me has crashed and burned and is not much more than a sea of smoldering bits and pieces.

That seems so dramatic and unnecessary though. I am literally typing in a room with a roof over my head and a carpet under my feet and furniture I could lie down on and a whole host of other things that some people would die to have like a refrigerator that I could stock with several weeks’ full of food if I didn’t choose to live week by week.

So one of these feelings is the facade. The metaphor, or the reality.

Weirdly, reality is the thing that doesn’t feel real.

Because I am sipping on tea that almost scalds my tongue, turning to look out the window and watching the rain crash onto the patio because I have a patio and I can simply watch the rain from the comfort of “inside” and hear the pitter patter of the liquid sky and treat it as a thing of beauty and not something that would make me wet and cold and cause hypothermia like the other people of the world who do not have the luxury of something called shelter—and yet, it all feels like a shell, something I’ve devised to shield myself from what I know is the actual reality.

That I am a walking shell. I feel lost, hollow, whatever soul that is supposed to exist in me sucked away, a ghost of a person simply lumbering around with the protections of comfort and money and a refrigerator that I could stock if I could just get myself to care more about feeding myself.

And what nice protections they are to have.

Many mornings, I buy a cup of coffee and take a walk around my city’s downtown. I don’t particularly like the coffee. I’m not even sure if I like walking around. I just do it because it gets me out of bed and that itself is a decent enough reason.

But some days my rational brain kicks in: Coffee now costs at least five dollars, and every financial lesson I’ve taken both purposeful and accidental has shown me how much money I could have if I just entrusted my five-dollars-a-day to the gods of compound interest, and future money saved is something I could really use right now.

So I try and go for a walk without the coffee, but I’m really just left longing for the coffee.

I try and replace the activity of a walk with the activity of going to the gym, but I’m really just annoyed at the gym and unsatisfied with my workout ability and frustrated at the other people around me for one reason or another.

I try and skip the going out entirely and just make tea in the morning but of all the permutations of my routine this one is the worst of all.

I look for other ways to modify this morning habit, and from all that I’ve learned about habits is that they’re rarely independent; they’re tied to things like time, or an activity. So instead of cutting out an afternoon snack at 3pm, change the snack to something healthier.

These principles worked for me in the past. For some reason, they are not working for me now.

A similar problem comes up when I try to eat, which is an inevitable task multiple times a day and follows an obvious feedback loop.

I feel the hunger in my stomach, the ache, both from the need of energy and also the knowledge of what mental pain is coming. I don’t know what I want to eat because the idea of taste itself is uninteresting.

So I tell myself that I should eat something healthy so I can at least keep my physical body in shape. But then what’s the point of eating if eating will just be a chore—I need to find those elusive moments of happiness and eating something delicious is one of them. But if nothing is going to taste good (let alone delicious) then what’s the point of taking the effort to find something good to eat? So I should eat something healthy so I can at least keep my physical body in shape. But then…

I’m stuck in this decision black hole and the only thing that pulls me out is the hunger that’s eventually so strong that I have no choice but to eat. So I eat a snack, or I go get fast food, which of all the options I had before me is also the worst one and it wasn’t one I was even considering and I now dread the next time my stomach signals that my body needs energy because if the idea of eating is this hard then what’s the point?

Why not just die?

I shouldn’t joke about it, because there are others who are not joking when they say such a thing. But it is one of the few ways I know how to cope. So I say it anyway.

“Do you think you might be a bit depressed—“

“Yes,” I interrupt. “Absolutely.”

My friend giggles and then sighs. I sigh with her.

I unload the remaining raw emotions in my mind and she takes it in stride while the two of us nibble on fried fish—she has snapper, I have catfish, and weirdly this is some of the first food I’ve had in a while that reminds me that taste is indeed something worth pursuing.

In between bites, I tell her that I just don’t know what to do anymore. If my hunger has mostly lost its taste for flavor, my ambitions fare even worse.

“What about your writing?” she asks me.

“Meh,” I shrug.

A soulful voice interrupts us over the speakers and we both recognize the voice as Anita Baker, swooning us mortals about being in love, sweet love.

“Oh wow,” my friend says, “now that’s a throwback.”

We munch and join in the song, mumbling about and only using words when Anita sings “sweet love” because they are the only words in the song we can actually remember. We do, however, remember the melody, ripped straight from our childhood minds and the song takes each of us back to our own childhoods when the world seemed much simpler. Seemed, because we all know better now, which seems to be a hallmark of no longer being children.

“You know what it honestly feels like?” I ask.

“What?”

“It’s like when you’re traveling,” I say, an analogy I know she will understand, “and you get that feeling where you just want to go home, right? Like, I’ve seen enough. I’ve seen everything I want to see. I don’t need to spend more time here. I can go home now.”

I have used this analogy with several friends. They all have different responses to it.

Where is home?

You still have home.

Well you haven’t actually experienced everything though.

My friend sitting in front of me has her own response, a response I predicted, and hearing her say it is actually more meaningful even though I knew she would say it because it confirms that I already knew she would understand me.

“I get that,” she says.

On one of my coffee walks—which I have resigned myself to continuing because inertia is easier on my mind than the frustration of the daily decision loop of whether to do the walk or not—I momentarily wonder if I’ve seen a rainforest.

This happens to be near a shopping mall with a walkway flanked by soil and plants and trees and it’s a silly attempt at nature because you cannot ignore the concrete buildings that surround it, but this morning there is a broken sprinkler spewing rain upwards and it catches my eye because on the way down the “rain” hits the tree, falls from the branches, and catches the light of the sun. It’s like a narrow, thin waterfall, prisms of refracting light all the way to the ground, and when I crop my vision just right, it looks like something straight out of Planet Earth.

I walk up to the scene in front of me and just stare. The way the beads of water fall. The glitter of the sun mid-air. The sound of droplets patting the soil. The way everything just feels wet.

I let myself be momentarily transported to what feels like a brand new world and I am fascinated. I am surprised.

I wonder if this is what a rainforest might actually be like. I have never seen one with my own two eyes, and I make a vow to myself to do just that one day.

One of the corollaries of “How do you start over?” is: What do you carry with you?

When you’re born, you carry the physical manifestations of generations before you through what we now know is DNA, a mix of two humans (and in the future maybe some technological modifications) who are themselves DNA carried forward from generations prior. You also carry the cultural and societal imprints of those who raise you, and those you interact with. When you’re born, you don’t really get much of a choice of what to carry.

When it’s your own life that you start over, it seems like you would now be able to choose exactly who you want to be, but you’re effectively still carrying parts of your past and who you were as a person so I’m not sure how much choice you really have.

I suppose you can change your appearance to a degree, though why bother since the stress of merely living (as well as aging) will naturally do that for you. You can immerse yourself in another culture, but you can never be somebody learning a set of cultural practices from scratch; only somebody learning new practices to replace or modify existing ones. You could pursue some new interests, but even then there are limitations. You can discover new interests, but can you actually choose to be into something that you simply are not into? Can I ever choose to be into racing sports cars? I doubt it.

If you’re old enough to start over in life, you must be old enough to know that there are some things in life that are no longer available to you.

It seems paradoxical. The younger you are, the more infinite the world seems. But the older you get, and the more you understand how the world works and how actually infinite the world truly is, the more finite our lives feel.

When I was six I could hope to be a soccer star, an astronaut, a famous musician. My imagination was limited.

I now have many more options. I could spend my next decade of life doing a billion things. And yet all I can focus on is what I can no longer be. Carrying one thing forward, means choosing billions of other things not to carry, even when there are trillions more things to choose from.

So how do you choose? How do you choose to commit again to starting a certain kind of life? How do you choose what to carry forward with you? How do you make any choice, when you know that the act of choice limits your future because that’s what choices are supposed to do?

How do you choose when you don’t even know what you want to choose?

There are the days when I wish my parents could just feed me. Because then I wouldn’t have to be disappointed with my own choices.

I have coffee again because I just cannot get away from the routine but this time I notice that the coffee is a bit sweeter than usual today. I don’t usually like sweet coffee, but whatever the barista did to it today, I really enjoyed, and I hope they do it again.

“Do you drink coffee? Or tea?” my dentist asks me.

“Yes.”

“Do you brush your teeth before or after?”

“Both.”

“Don’t brush your teeth afterwards. What you should do instead is take some water and swish it around.”

Perhaps I am too naive to do anything besides blindly follow dental authority so I listen and obey.

I go home, cup my hands together to catch the water falling from the faucet and I watch the water form bubbles on the surface and my inner child speaks Cantonese and goes póuh muht póuh muht! I tilt my hands and let the water flow into my mouth and I swirl it around, feeling it go from left to right to up to down and back again and again and again and I do that pulsating cheek thing that makes me look like a fish when I glance up in the mirror and I laugh and choke a little bit as I spit the water out. Which of course means I have to do it again.

“I have another suggestion for you,” my dentist adds on my next visit. “When you brush your teeth at night, don’t rinse your mouth with water. Your enamel is a little weak.”

I’m mildly skeptical about this recommendation, but besides doing some internet searches, talking to my friends and checking the advice of social media (which is the absolute min-max of poor life choices) I read a topic that begins: “I just found out you're not supposed to rinse after brushing. What hygiene-related fact shocked you?” and it seems like there is some merit to this idea after all.

I give it a shot. It feels weird, to not rinse. It feels like there is something on my teeth, because there is. But I wonder if that’s the point.

It seems odd to have to revisit habits like brushing teeth in one’s thirties but I suppose we are always learning new things about the world and growing into new people because we are not static. So why not.

“It can be kind of hard to be excited about life now,” my friend continues while we are still nibbling on fried snapper and catfish because this restaurant was quite generous with their portions. “Even traveling. You just kind of know how things go now, you know?”

I nod. The phases of traveling are the same, even if the places and people are different. The nervousness. The excitement. The thrill of connecting with locals. The intrigue of seeing what a new location even looks like. The wonder of encountering something off the beaten path. The awe of nature. The comparing of how here is different from home. The imagination of “could we live here.”

The quiet dread, or the gentle anticipation of coming home to your own bed. Of The End.

I think that’s another thing that’s hard about starting over. You know how things end. You know that things do end. Starting over by definition, means that something just ended.

One of the principles I try to follow is the belief that knowing exactly how something goes—or ends—doesn’t change whether or not it’s worth doing.

It is a principle that Life is rattling, and I can tell that I am not figuratively far from throwing the principle to the wind.

“Maybe that’s just part of getting older,” my friend says.

“It probably is,” I sigh, and pick at my remaining french fries. “Maybe it’s just a loss of innocence or something.”

My friend’s boyfriend perks up. And though he has been sitting here this entire time he has chosen to say very little, until now, until he is ready to dole out his wisdom which is both wise and a lesson in succinctness.

“You guys aren’t even that old, come on.”

The two of us want to contest, but how can we? He is older than both of us are.

And then he adds: “You don’t actually think you won’t ever be surprised again, do you?”

Not everyone loves my use of the phrase “starting over.” Even some of my friends don’t like it.

Some think it’s too nihilistic.

Some think it paints the thing that ended in too negative of a light.

Some think it’s inaccurate, that I’m not actually starting over but instead, starting again.

At some point in my past I would have debated each argument and nuance and dimension and facet so that everyone understood exactly the concept stewing in my head.

Instead, I notice that I am not my past and now simply say: Language is imperfect. Just like everything else in life.

Surprise requires expectation. It requires luck, which you can maximize by allowing yourself the space and time to be surprised. Sometimes, it also requires that you be paying attention.

And one night, I am paying attention when I am taking a shower and watching water exist as both liquid and vapor, simultaneously dripping down the shower glass and rising as clouds above my head and I wonder what it would be like to drop a few ice cubes into the mix and complete the holy trinity and I also can’t help but be amazed that a chemical can take on three different physical forms.

When I get out, I throw on the softest sweatshirt I have and the softest pair of pants and I collapse into a wicker basket chair which is made for the outdoors but my mom used to use it inside the house and I have adopted the same habit and I wonder why because the chair is not soft.

But it is her chair, and I’m suddenly reminded of her, and the truth is I have wanted to cry for a long time but have never been someone to force myself into crying and all I can do is allow for myself to cry when my body wants to cry and suddenly my body says now is the time to cry and I realize this because I am already beyond tearing up and I am bawling because it does hurt so much and I’m about to scream because I honestly want a parent to swoop down from on high and pick me up and hold me and that desire makes it all worse because I know that will never happen because I have already gone through the experience of watching a parent crying in pain and me being the one to rush to their side and trying to hold them and once those roles are swapped, the swap is permanent.

I can’t go back.

Those moments, the culmination of years of struggle and heartache but also depth and meaning that I committed to memory because I somehow knew those moments were precious and that I wouldn’t have that many of them although i didn’t think I would have so few—and yet believing I wouldn’t have that many served its purpose. I committed them to memory, and I am forever thankful for that, because I can’t go back.

All I can do now is try to move forward, to let everything burn, to let everything hurt, to be surprised by how much it hurts, how much it stings, how long it takes for me to quiet down—to crop my vision of my life to just this moment and do nothing else but sit and notice and pay attention to how hard moving on still is.

And then notice how it feels to pick myself back up, to pick up all the pieces, one after another, and to ask if I even want to bother trying again.

My heart says no. My brain says no. I do not know if I believe in a soul, but there is something else within me that is not my heart nor my brain that says that even if I don’t want to move on, I have to.

I have to.

And even if I don’t know what it is that compels me to listen, I choose to listen to it, because that is what I am training myself to do. To listen to myself, and pay attention.

Because I’m starting to notice that this is the experience that is starting over in life. This is how it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be painful. It’s supposed to feel suffocating. It’s supposed to feel like falling apart while sitting in a wicker basket chair in sweats and still hot from a hot shower.

I just don’t know if I can do it. I have felt lost and broken about many things, but I have not felt so lost and broken about everything, all at once, to the point where I think of the future and I have no choice but to laugh, because the thought of the future simply seems impossible.

But maybe that’s also part of what starting over is. And I choose to notice it, to pay attention, and to commit to memory.

On one morning walk, I notice that the leaves of the trees have finally turned orange, yellow and red. This should hardly feel like a surprise after three decades of fall arriving and yet it sort of is. It’s been a long, never-ending summer where I wrote shorts and a t-shirt well into the depths of October and suddenly one day it’s simply too cold and fall is actually here and not a memory.

I alter my evening plans and instead of whatever I was going to do, I hike into the hills to watch the sunset. The trees of suburbia look different from up here, like a cartoon, some trees still green, but the others have turned into domes of orange, yellow and red. Being above the trees makes them look like the bubble coverings that often show up in many sci-if visions of future homes. Being far from them gives them shape. Being not too far means their leaves give them a felt-like texture. Even in my hometown, there is so much to see and I have never really noticed it from this vantage point.

So I just stand and watch as the sun disappears behind the hills and it’ll soon be too dark to see anything except the final traces of color streak across the sky and part of me wonders why any of my life’s problems should matter so much to me because the world is so fucking beautiful and no amount of me will ever stop the world from being what it is and so why not—why not be surprised, why not still be in awe, why not let the world still take your breath away?

In psychology, they teach you one way to determine that babies can understand certain concepts of the world is to measure the amount of time and attention they spend watching something. For example, object permanence. Show a baby one object that hits collides with another and they don’t bat an eye. Show an object that simply phases through another object and they will stare for an extra second or two. They will continue on with their baby-life, but for a moment, they will be surprised, and they will know that something was off.

That’s how they learn about the world. That’s how they start their baby-lives.

I am on one of my morning walks when I see this in action. There is a child who is barely able to walk and although their movement is guided by two adults, their eyes and hands are free to do as they please. And the child does do as they please, turning to look at everything because everything is a surprise—the traffic lights, the store signs, the white lines on the street, the pedestrian crossing signal that beeps when the child touches it so they touch it again and again and again.

The child touches everything, or at least tries to. The adults try in vain to stop them.

I was once that child. I know because I’m suddenly reminded of my mom, who loved to tell the story of my first hamburger. I was a baby, it was at a McDonald’s, and I sat in a booster chair, took the packaged burger, pulled off the paper wrapper and went: “WOW”

“What happened to that baby?” she always said afterwards. “Why isn’t he like that anymore?”