Your Fresh Start Starts Today!
Or tomorrow... or the next day!
“I’ll start tomorrow. Maybe after the weekend. I’ve start it on Monday. I have to start next week. I’ll do it next month. No, it is too late now: I’ll start in the new year... in the new decade. But now it just feels too late. Why even start when everytime you start, you fail, yet again and again?”
A fresh start… or many fresh starts
Since I started high school in 2009, I can’t count how many times I have needed to take a fresh start. I’ll name a dancing as an example. I’ve felt like I’ve had to take a fresh start with my dancing career countless times. Regardless of how passionate I was to dance and express myself, I let myself throw it away several times. Either that or life just decided that I had to let it go. In 2012, I was dancing with Temecula Dance Company, under Erik Saradpon. With him, success into the industry seemed like the norm, not the exception. Even though I tried my best under his tutelage my senior year, I couldn’t seem to find his favor. I let it go with shame and didn’t start anew until I got into UCLA, dancing with Samahang Modern. It only took me two quarters until I decided to quit Spring Quarter of my first year in 2014. The space just wasn’t right for me.
I wouldn’t take a fresh start to begin dancing seriously until Summer of 2016, two years later with Versa Style. I fell in love with house and the freedom that freestyling brought. I was liberated, I was exercising, I lost weight, and I was with a team that I could see myself pursuing a serious dance career with. But life got in the way. Crippling depression reduced my joy with dance to nothing but white noise. I was faking happiness and energy during class —afraid that at any moment that I would be found out as a fraud. It finally culminated to me sending a tearful email, resigning from the team hours before a performance. I was torn between letting a future with Versa Style go and honoring my body and mind, which was utterly burnt out. I clawed my way out of depression after graduation by the turn of the year in 2017.
It took me a while to find a fresh start dancing again.
I felt that maybe it was time to “grow up” and build my career to be bigger than substitute teaching. But once again, in early 2018, dance called me back, this time with the style of waacking. Waacking is free, LGBTQ-based. It enabled me to be myself more than any other style. Once again, I had a vision to be the best waacker I could be. I would cycle between losing the will to dance due to depression and finding it again in the middle of 2019.
Now it is the end of a decade, I am 25, and I am in love with dance more than ever.
I’ve started fresh again. I’ve beaten myself up many times, wishing I could have just stuck with dance since 2009. Then I would be so much better and so much further along like my peers who had the capacity to stick to something, but those types of thoughts don’t really help in the end. I had to lose dance to learn how much I loved it. In the same way that I’ve had to let my habits crumble to realize how integral they are to my sanity. I’ve had to go through depression countless times and pick myself up piece by piece, to extract every bit of joy when I am manic and learn every little lesson when I am depressed.
Failing and picking yourself up each time
Throughout the decade I’ve failed a lot —in dance, career, relationships, friendships, personal development, habits, etc. I know it’s kinda cliche, but I’ve also restarted every single time I’ve failed. I started my post-graduate career as a tutor, transitioned into substitute teacher, became a data analyst in the Philipines, then back to substitute teaching and tutoring, to now working at a non-profit. Life hasn’t gotten easier, but like a video game, I level up and so does the game of life. With each start, I get stronger. Now, even with dance, I strive to not do my best in dance, but to be my best in the process; if that looks like me setting dance down, I will leave it with humility and pick it up again if it is in my path to do so.
It’s a new decade; thus new opporutnities to start anew the commitments you’ve failed in and renew commitment towards the things you are doing well. Try something new. Pick up something old. Jump into a new career. If you miss this opportunity to start anew, don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t take things too seriously. Life’s too short and you are better than that.. Maybe today isn’t your fresh start. Rest now, and who knows, tomorrow can be your fresh start… Or the next day. You can choose when it is your time. You can choose when it is your time. It’s never too late to let go and start anew.