You’re Not Starting Over. You’re Carrying It With You.

My brother used to get visibly frustrated with me when I’d say things like, “I just need to start over.”

New idea.
New business.
New version of myself.

To me, it felt honest. Clean. Almost merciful. Ground zero meant no baggage. No expectations. No past failures following me into the room.

But to him, it sounded wrong. Almost insulting.

He’d stop me mid-sentence and say something like,
“You’re not starting from nothing. Why do you keep saying that?”

And I’d shrug. Because that’s what it felt like. When something ends, or collapses, or exhausts you to the point of numbness, it really does feel like standing in a scorched field with nothing left but smoke.

But he was right. Annoyingly right. The kind of right you don’t appreciate until later.

What he was trying to tell me, without the language I have now, was this:
There is no such thing as ground zero once you’ve lived a life.

You don’t lose your skills just because you’re tired.
You don’t erase your instincts because you’re scared.
You don’t suddenly become inexperienced because something didn’t work the way you hoped.

Every job.
Every failed launch.
Every business that paid the bills and every one that quietly died.
Every season of burnout, caregiving, reinvention, and self-doubt.

It all stacks.

Building upon building upon building.

Even the parts that didn’t look successful from the outside: the false starts, the pivots, the “what the hell was I thinking?” phases, those are load-bearing walls. You just don’t see them until you try to build again.

I think I used starting over as a kind of emotional anesthesia.
If it was ground zero, then I didn’t have to reconcile with the past.
I didn’t have to integrate it.
I didn’t have to carry the weight of what I already knew.

But experience doesn’t ask permission to follow you. It just does.

And maybe that’s not a burden. Maybe it’s the quiet advantage we forget we have, especially those of us who are no longer new, shiny, or 25.

Starting again doesn’t mean erasing yourself. It means trusting that the foundation is already there, even if the structure above it needs to change. So now, when I feel that familiar urge to burn it all down and “start fresh,” I pause. I try to hear my brother’s firm voice.

You’re not at zero.
You’re standing on everything you’ve already survived, learned, and built.

And that counts for more than we think.

The Comparison Trap (a familiar one)

Social media loves a “Day One.”

Someone announces a fresh start and somehow it already looks finished. Branded. Polished. Profitable. Meanwhile your version of Day One feels like a pile of half-formed thoughts and a Google Doc named final_final_v3.

So you assume you’re behind. But you’re not. You’re comparing your private mess to someone else’s public edit. Their “overnight success” is usually just Chapter 10 of a story that started years ago, in another career, another life, another version of themselves.

When you stop believing in the myth of the blank slate, something shifts. You’re not starting over. You’re starting from experience. And that’s not losing the race. That’s just being on a different lap.