How To Start Again

Sometimes life deals you unfair blows. Sometimes you wake up and realise that this just isn’t good enough for you. Sometimes you bang your head against a brick wall and realisation does not strike until blood fills your eyes. Sometimes my lovelies, you have to take a long, hard look at the life you have created and start again.

Heaven knows extracting yourself from the life you have squeezed yourself so determinedly into is horribly hard. One must not underestimate the strength and the guts it takes to say this isn’t enough. This isn’t the life I choose to have. Only the very brave, in fact, can dig up courage enough to do it, so if you are halfway to acknowledging that you need more, then give yourself the gentlest of pats on the back, because you are one of the few willing to admit that sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes the best laid plans fail and sometimes we have to look at ourselves square in the mirror and say this stops now.

This stops now.

So today is the day we start again. It doesn’t matter that it is Wednesday not Monday. The middle of the month and not the end of it. It doesn’t matter that there hasn’t been time enough to make preparations for this new start. To buy supplies for all the things we imagine we will need. It doesn’t matter if we ate half of the pantry for breakfast again or haven’t yet made a to-do list. It doesn’t matter if we are too old or not old enough. None of it matters because deciding to start again is a decision. A decision we can make in a split second.

We can decide to start again in the moment we step out of the shower. As we close the door behind us on our way to a job we hate. As we are bending over to load the dishwasher. When we take the cakes out of the oven, or lean over to kiss our babies goodnight. It’s just a thought, a thought you can choose to have. I am going to start again. And once that thought exists we cannot resist it’s faint, shrill call. We must acknowledge and decide right then and there to do whatever it takes to begin all over again. To shake off what is left of bad choices and desperate experiences and to move into a future created by careful, authentic design.

But oh where to begin? Begin my darling in the fridge. Under the bed. Or in the closet. Begin by writing this isn’t what I want in huge lipstick letters over a broad sheet, or by running until you can hear your heart banging in your ears. Take a few days off. A few days out of your life to say goodbye to what went before and to work out what comes next. Light a candle and light up possibility. Play music so loud the neighbours complain. Take to your bed. Take to the shops. Don’t talk of it. Don’t make it a big deal, just allow the fire to start to rage inside you and do whatever it takes to move forward. Even if it means you are starved of calories or love or  respect or clothes or money in the short term.

Tell yourself I need more ten thousand times a day. Think it more often often than men are reported to think of sex. Every six seconds.  Say it as you open your eyes in the morning and before you close them at night. study every aspect of your life and ask yourself, will it really do? Am I happy making do? Am I happy at all?

Let the fire rage sweetie. Then start again. If I can do it, then you can too.

P.S: it’s ok to be scared.