When I think about the words starting over, I think about how many times in my life I believed I was doing exactly that.
Starting from zero.
Leaving one life behind and beginning another.
But the more I look back at my life, the more I question whether we ever truly start over.
Maybe we don't start over at all.
Maybe we simply begin a new chapter.
The First Time I Thought I Was Starting Over
One of the first times I remember feeling like I was starting over was when my husband and I moved from Sicily to Frosinone, a city near Rome.
Until then, I had always lived close to where I was born and where generations of my family had lived. Living somewhere else wasn't something I had really imagined for myself.
My husband looked at the move differently. He was excited. It was another part of Italy to discover, new places to visit and something different for us to experience.
I was scared.
It was the first time I would live outside everything I knew.
And I quickly discovered that even though we were still in Italy, life was different from the place where I had grown up.
But eventually, we found somewhere to live. We made friends. We learned our new routines.
The unfamiliar slowly became familiar.
And something I had originally been afraid of became exciting.
Looking back, I also realize that this was an important chapter in our marriage.
For the first time, it was really just the two of us trying to create a life together without the people we had always had around us. We had to depend on one another, make decisions together and figure things out ourselves.
Without realizing it, we were growing.
And Then Life Changed Again
Things in Frosinone were good for a while.
But, like so many things in life, circumstances changed.
Eventually, we found ourselves facing a difficult decision: continue working hard without seeing much reward or opportunity for our future, or take a much bigger risk and try to build a life in the United States.
In 2010, we chose the United States.
We moved to Arizona with three pieces of luggage.
That was everything we had with us.
We didn't have jobs. We didn't have our own place. We had very little money, and I barely spoke English.
We really had only two certainties.
My husband would return to school using his GI Bill benefits, and we could temporarily stay with family while I waited for my green card and the paperwork that would allow me to work.
If there was ever a moment that looked like starting from zero, that was probably it.
Building a Life With Very Little
After a few months of paperwork, I finally received authorization to work and started looking for a job.
I was incredibly nervous when I got my first interview.
My English was broken, and I knew communicating would be difficult.
But underneath that nervousness, I had confidence that somehow I could make it work.
I got the job.
That job became the beginning of my career in retail.
Once I started working, my husband and I rented a small apartment. We bought what we needed: a bed, a couch and a dining table.
That was pretty much it.
For the next couple of years, we didn't have much else in our apartment.
We went to the public library because we didn't have internet at home. My husband would work on his college assignments while I studied English.
At the time, we weren't thinking about how meaningful those moments might eventually become.
We were simply doing what we needed to do.
We were building our life.
Maybe I Was Never Starting Over
For years afterward, things continued to change.
At the time, many of those moments felt like major changes in our lives. Looking back now, though, I see them differently.
What was changing wasn't only our circumstances.
We were growing and evolving.
And that realization made me go even further back.
Maybe my life didn't “start over” when I left Sicily.
Maybe it didn't start over when we moved to Arizona with three pieces of luggage.
If I really wanted to find the beginning of this particular story, perhaps it was years earlier, when I was in my early twenties and decided to marry someone from another country.
I couldn't have known where that one decision would eventually take me.
Everything that followed became part of the evolution of the life we chose to build together.
One decision led to another.
One place led to another.
One experience prepared us for the next.
And one chapter became another chapter.
We Don't Start From Zero
This is why I no longer believe that starting a new chapter means starting from zero.
When something changes unexpectedly—especially something we didn't choose—we can be even more afraid because we didn't plan for it.
Sometimes we don't want the change at all.
Even changes we choose can be frightening because they require us to leave our routines, our comfort and sometimes the version of life we already understand.
But there is something important we often forget:
You already know more than you did the last time your life changed.
You have more life experience.
You've made difficult decisions before.
You've made mistakes and learned from them.
You've faced things you once didn't know how to handle and somehow figured them out.
You aren't the same person you were five, ten or twenty years ago.
So how could you possibly be starting from zero?
You're bringing all of that with you.
A New Chapter Can Still Be Scary
None of this means change suddenly becomes easy.
A new chapter can require a completely different routine. You may need to learn something new, leave behind something familiar or let go of a version of your life that you thought would last much longer.
And sometimes you won't know whether the next chapter will be better.
I certainly didn't know.
When I left Sicily, I didn't know that I would eventually move to another country.
When I arrived in Arizona with three pieces of luggage, I didn't know that my first job would become the beginning of a career.
When I sat in the public library trying to learn English, I didn't know what my life would look like years later.
We rarely get to see where one decision will eventually lead.
We simply make the best decision we can with what we know at that moment and continue moving forward.
And when life makes the decision for us, we figure out how to move forward from there.
Sometimes a Chapter Needs to End
Not every new chapter begins because something exciting happened.
Sometimes it begins because the chapter you're living has become too difficult to continue.
Maybe circumstances outside of your control have changed your life.
Maybe you've spent months—or even years—trying to make something work.
Maybe you've been carrying stress for so long that you don't even remember what life felt like before you were exhausted.
There are times when we reach a point where we're simply done.
Emotionally tired.
Mentally drained.
No longer happy with the life we're living.
And sometimes admitting that can be frightening because ending a chapter can feel like admitting that we failed.
But those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Sometimes a chapter ends not because you failed, but because something needs to change.
Maybe you did everything you could with the circumstances you had.
Maybe you stayed longer than you should have because you were afraid of what would happen if you left.
Maybe life changed around you until the place, relationship, career or situation that once worked for you simply didn't anymore.
And maybe choosing something different is exactly how you begin finding yourself again.
A new chapter can still be scary, but it can also be exciting.
There can be relief in realizing that you don't have to keep fighting to preserve something that is no longer working.
There can be strength in saying:
This chapter mattered. I learned from it. But I'm ready for something different.
You aren't erasing what came before.
You aren't pretending it didn't matter.
And you aren't necessarily walking away because you failed.
Sometimes you're walking forward because you finally understand that you need a change to find your strength, your energy and your joy again.
The next chapter won't automatically fix everything.
You will still have things to figure out.
But sometimes simply knowing that you're moving toward something different can give you something you haven't felt in a long time:
Hope.
And maybe that's when change stops feeling only like something you're losing and starts feeling like something you're finally ready to discover.
You Are Bringing Your Previous Chapters With You
If you're facing a major life change right now, especially one you didn't plan or ask for, you may feel as though everything you've built has disappeared.
You may look at what's ahead and think:
I don't know how to start over.
Maybe you don't have to.
Look at the chapters you've already lived.
Think about the things you once believed you couldn't handle.
Think about the decisions you made without knowing exactly where they would lead.
Think about the person you were then and the person you are now.
You know more than you think you do.
Whatever happened in the chapter you're leaving doesn't disappear simply because you're turning the page.
You carry the lessons with you.
You carry the experience.
You carry the knowledge.
And hopefully, you carry a little more confidence because now you have proof that you've made it through change before.
The next chapter may still scare you.
You may not have chosen it.
You may not know where it's going.
And you certainly don't need to have everything figured out before you begin.
Because a chapter can have mattered, taught you something, and still need to end.
The chapter before this one helped create the person who is about to begin the next.
So maybe we should stop calling it starting over.
You're not going backward.
You're not erasing everything that came before.
And you're certainly not starting from zero.
You aren't starting over. You're turning the page.