The Art of Starting Over…Again

On rebuilding, again and again, and choosing yourself every time.

Nobody tells you the truth about starting over. It is not one big moment, not a single dramatic leap you take once and then live inside forever. It is something you end up doing over and over, in ways that rarely look like what you pictured.

I have started over more times than I can count.

I started over at seventeen, when I lost my father and, for all intents and purposes, lost my only parent in the same breath. My mother and I have been estranged for most of my life, and while that is a longer story than I will tell here, I will say this much. If you have ever felt like a motherless child while your mother is still living, I want you to know you are not alone, and there is no shame in protecting your own peace, even when it means walking a harder road alone. My father raised my sister and me by himself, and when he was gone, I had to learn how to build a family identity without either parent standing behind me.

I started over again when I packed up everything I knew in New Jersey and moved to a city where I did not know a single person, simply because I fell in love with it on a visit.

I started over when I became a mother myself, and had to figure out, in real time, what kind of parent I wanted to be without the model I wished I had.

I started over again years into building a full career, when I decided that real estate was not just going to be something I dabbled in, but a second, fully real chapter of who I am, built alongside a full time job, not instead of it.

And I am starting over again now, in the quiet way that does not announce itself. I am outliving my father. He was forty three when he passed, and I am now past the age he ever got to be. Every year past that number feels like something I get to do that he did not, and I do not take a single one of them for granted. I do not shy away from talking about my age, because I have earned every year of it, and I happen to like the woman these years have made me.

What Starting Over Actually Requires

None of these were single moments. Each one was a hundred smaller decisions, made on ordinary days that did not feel historic while they were happening. Starting over rarely announces itself with fanfare. It looks like waking up one more day and choosing, again, to build something different than what you had before.

If you are in the middle of one of your own right now, a new city, a new career, a new stage of motherhood, a new relationship with your own family or the absence of one, I want you to know that the middle is supposed to feel unfinished. It does not mean you are doing it wrong. It means you are doing it.

You knew. Now walk in it.

Same Eboni. Fuller version.