No Such Thing As A Fresh Start

The unspoken hope is that you won’t just change a few things for the better, but make a total break with the past. You’ll reboot your life, leave disorganization and procrastination behind you once and for all, and do everything differently from now on.

As you’re presumably aware, this is a terrible mindset for actually making lasting changes. What you need, instead, are tiny goals and a commitment to incremental progress, plus a willingness to encounter failure after failure as you stumble toward improvement. To put it another way: fresh-startism is a form of perfectionism, and as with all forms of perfectionism, the solution is to stop being such a perfectionist — to resign yourself to the fact that things probably won’t unfold as flawlessly as you’d hoped.

This much (as a recovering perfectionist) I’ve understood for years.But I’ve only more recently grasped the deeper point here, which isn’t simply that fresh starts don’t work as intended, but that there never are any fresh starts in the first place. Contrary to self-help cliché, the thing we perfectionists need to learn isn’t that we’re prob-ably going to experience failure. It’s that we’ve already failed, totally and irredeemably. This is liable to sound incredibly depressing, but it’s actually fantastic news. Allow me to elaborate.

Behind our more strenuous attempts at personal change, there’s almost always the desire for a feeling of control. We want to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over our lives, so that we might finally feel secure and in charge, and no longer so vulnerable to events. But whichever way you look at it, this kind of control is an illusion. It implies the ability to somehow stand back from or get outside of your life — which you never can, obviously, because you just are your life.

What this means, for one thing, is that the perfectionist’s fantasy of reaching her deathbed with a perfect record of accomplishments under her belt isn’t just extremely unlikely, but doomed from the start, because (to mix metaphors) the years she’s already lived are water under the bridge. All the time you’ve already wasted, the people you’ve disappointed, the opportunities you failed to seize – it’s all already happened, and can never be undone.

It also means that the person attempting to leave the past behind, by making a fresh start, is one who’s been completely shaped by that past. The self you’re seeking to transform is the same one that’s doing the transforming — so you’re like Baron Munchausen, trying to pull himself out of the swamp by yanking on his own hair. You can never start life afresh, because you’re hopelessly stuck in this life; there’s no breaking through to another one in which everything’s different and better.