By Emily Lorraine Franco
We have mistaken consistency for character and permanence for success.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that the most admirable people are those who never change their minds. We celebrate the student who graduates from the program they innocently chose at seventeen. We applaud the person who remains devoted to the career they once swore was their calling. We romanticize unwavering ambition and immortalize those who “never gave up.” In a culture that worships perseverance, starting over has become synonymous with failure.
We have glorified perseverance to the point of cruelty. We built a whole religion out of not looking back. We praise people for staying without ever asking whether staying still serves them. We have become so enamored with the idea of commitment that we have transformed change into a character flaw. To leave is to quit. To begin again is to waste time. To outgrow a dream is to betray it. And so we kept walking roads that stopped being ours a long time ago, mistaking the blisters for proof we were still on the right path. What an unforgiving way to understand growth.
Starting over has a way of making even the right decision feel humiliating: another year, another first day, another answer to the people who were certain they already knew where your life was going. Sayang, they say, while no one asks how many Sundays have already been ruined by the thought of the coming Monday, or how long pride has been asking you to endure what you are ashamed to leave.
There is no shame in packing up a life you know by heart if knowing it by heart is the only reason you still call it home.
We inherited a linear understanding of success. We believe life progresses neatly from ambition to achievement, from beginning to completion. We have left little room for detours, redirections, and reinventions, as if starting over were evidence that we took the wrong path rather than evidence that we had the courage to choose a better one.
Growing up is an exercise in selective loss. Every choice we make is simultaneously a rejection of countless others. We cannot become the doctor, artist, lawyer, entrepreneur, scientist, and writer we dreamed of becoming all at once. To become is, in many ways, to let go.
The bravest thing we can become right now is not successful, but willing to begin again. There is no shame in changing your course, plans, profession, or definition of success. There is no shame in grieving the lives you almost lived. There is no shame in thanking a dream for carrying you as far as it could before finally letting it go.
Because the child who once dreamed those dreams was never asking us to fulfill every possibility they imagined. They were only hoping that, despite all the possibilities we had to leave behind, we would still have the courage to begin again..
