On starting over...

Starting over. It feels weird because I don’t know where to begin. It’s like I woke up in the middle of a video game with a vague idea about the beginning and no idea about the next steps. It’s like you picked up the game second hand, arrived home, opened it up and realised there’s no manual inside. Furthermore, it’s a niche game from the 1990s. So there's barely any information about the game, only a fringe group of enthusiasts on a reddit thread from ten years ago that can’t give you what you need. So what do you do? I guess the first step is to glance around. Search for familiarity and explore your environment. Then, what can you do? Learn about what fuels you and what drains you. Lean into the former, avoid the latter. Search for allies. Find out your quest. 

Since we are talking in analogies, I learned one of the most important life lessons ever from gaming. I’m not a huge gamer but I have dabbled over the years as most of my close female friends are seriously into it. When I was back in secondary school, I played final fantasy 10 for the first time. (A beautiful classic, highly recommend). I am not a confrontational person in life, nor in games, so when I realised that there was the option to run away from battles it was a thing that I did very often. It became a habit. I ran away from battles big and small because I couldn’t be bothered to face them. They took a lot of time and if you failed you would have to restart at a check point when you died. I had skipped many battles but then, I reached one of the biggest battles in the middle of the game. It was one of the boss levels which meant that this battle was unskippable. After many many many failed attempts I realised something terrible. I had skipped so many battles that I didn’t have a strong enough level to defeat the boss. Each battle big and small, levels up your power and skills and pushes you forward. Avoiding them left me weak and underprepared for the boss level. It dawned on me that if I wanted to defeat this boss I’d have to start the entire game completely from the beginning and make sure to complete many more battles, to confront things head on and not run away whenever things seemed too difficult. 

Teenage me threw the console across the room in anger and didn’t touch the game again for months. But the adult me reflects on that lesson often. In life battles are not skippable. You cannot run away from the hard things even when you want to because they give you the skills to move forward to the next level. Every battle is grounds for learning something new. You become stronger and wiser each time you confront hardships. They are not fun, they even break you sometimes, but they help you discover the power within to keep going. So now in the back of my mind, even when it’s hard, I remember to try to show up everyday. 

But, as with games you can press the reset button. Unlike games it’s not a complete do over but more like restarting from a check point after you were defeated by the previous battle. Okay- enough with the analogies. I am sure it’s clear now. I am at the part in my own life where I am taking stock of my environment, arming myself, finding my allies. For me it’s the moment before the quest.