The hard reset

Have you ever started over? Tried to reinvent yourself in a new city, with a new career, different friends, and maybe, a different you. Well, perhaps just a different version of you. After all, you can’t run away from yourself. Or so the song goes.

Not everyone wants to recreate who they are. For most people, the thought of losing their identity is terrifying. If you were forced to restart your life, relocated and all, the disconnect could be a lot to handle. You might desperately seek any way you can to remain exactly who you were, or at least cling to some token or custom of your previous life. Just ask any immigrant.

So then I wonder: If you can’t run fast enough to escape yourself, how can you expect to chase the person you were? You can’t be what you're not. You can’t fight it or force it. Change happens at its own speed, with no warning or remorse. So no, you can’t run away from yourself and you can’t chase who you used to be either.

Its easy to end up on both sides of this equation. I've been there several times. You don't like where you're from or where you're at in life, so you build a vision of how great everything is going to be as soon as you run off to wherever. But then you get there and it isn't how you envisioned it, and you feel lost or out of place because you only know how to function where you're from. So then you try to recreate your old home within the new one. Its not the same but you do the best you can, blending your old ways with the new surroundings. Your life becomes unique, a hybrid of all your experiences, but it never checks all the boxes. You never really blend in, but you can never fully recreate what you're missing from your old life. You start to become homesick, but it’s just nostalgia casting its light through rose colored glass across the same shitty view that you ran away from in the first place. If you go back and look around in the light of day, it’s nothing like you remembered, and you're still lost. But maybe, just maybe, you learned something along the way.

I had just traveled full circle through this process, returning home to NYC after ten years living in Las Vegas, when another type of reset occurred. I lost everything on my laptop's hard drive. The contents contained writing, video and audio which had chronicled the past year of my life. My departure from the desert, the cross-country drive, and my arrival back home, were all erased from record and relegated to ghostly flashes, similar to what a dream looks like, just before it fades out of view.

I was already lost in a hometown that seemed unrecognizable, struggling to both resume and redefine my identity as an individual, and reignite my career. And I had just lost the trail of breadcrumbs that I'd been laying out like a lifeline, that in my hopes could lead me back to somewhere or something, perhaps myself.

This wasn't just a loss of personal memories. The essays, short stories and media projects contained on the drive were my portfolio. As a writer, producer, video editor and artist, these were the very tools I was relying on to find work. It was a living breathing record of everything I had learned and how I had developed my craft. And now it was all gone.

But here's the thing. My work, as personal as it was, wasn't my identity. Although it was a record of my journey, it was also a journey of its own. Just like my actual travels across the continent and back, my creative ventures had shaped who I am and how I write today. Change is everywhere and it’s in everything.

The fact that I am writing a piece about the loss of work on an otherwise blank laptop, is proof that destruction can lead to new creative ideas, a new voice, and a fresh perspective. Losing the person that you were, can lead to you growing into the person you needed to become. The key to both of these progressions is acceptance. Acceptance of loss and change is the best way to see and thrive with what’s new.