What’s worth keeping

Balancing memories of a lived experience with the desire to start over with a clean slate

There’s a strange urge that hits after burnout: the urge to burn it all down. The job, the routines, the relationships, even the version of yourself that lived through it. You’re so exhausted, so hurt, that it feels like the only way out is a full reset. A clean slate. No trace of the before.

But I often remind myself that not everything from before was bad.

Some parts of my life held me together. A morning walk. Waking up early enough to spend some time at a coffee shop with a book before I started my workday. That hobby I did just for me. The playlist I put on during hard days that still made me smile.

These small, quiet things—they won’t save you from burnout, but they didn’t cause it either. And that matters. They’re worth keeping, because they remind me of who I am.

My therapist recently reminded me that moving on doesn’t mean starting from scratch. You’re not rebuilding an empty shell. You’re not going back to who you were before, either—because you can’t. With your lived experience, that version of you doesn’t exist anymore.

But that experience does shape who you become.

Recovery is reassembly. It’s a process of holding each piece in your hands and asking:

Is this worth keeping?

Not everything will be. But some things are. The right things are.

You might keep the habit of sending a voice memo to a friend each week.

Or the way you lit a candle before work.

Or that book you re-read every year because it reminded you who you were.

This is how you build a new version of yourself—not from scratch, but from truth. From memory. From lived experience. From the parts that still feel like yours. You hold onto what makes you you while leaving space to welcome the change to come.

I don’t have to be the person I was before. I just want to become someone that feels like home.

PS: I’m writing my first paid post on mourning the loss of ambition. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a paid subscriber.