Tides and Foundations: The Peculiar Freedom of Starting Over

During my time at UCSD, I knew a woman—the only female student in the physics program—who maintained an impressive collection of snow globes. She acquired them throughout her academic journey, displaying them proudly on custom-built shelves in her apartment. One afternoon, an earthquake—minor by California standards—sent the entire collection crashing to the floor. Thirty-seven miniature worlds, accumulated over years of scientific conferences and academic travels, reduced to glass shards and puddles in moments.

What struck me wasn't her loss but her response: she swept up the remains, donated her surviving globes to a professor's child, and converted the shelves into a home for her quantum mechanics textbooks and research papers. When I asked why she hadn't attempted to rebuild her collection, she looked at me with genuine confusion. "Why would I create something I've already experienced?"1

This memory surfaced recently as I contemplated a universal truth of adulthood—one nobody prepares us for during our formative years, nestled somewhere between the quadratic equation and warnings about strangers offering free drugs which, incidentally, has never once happened in my entire adult life. At some point, everyone must begin again. Not merely adjust or pivot, but completely dismantle and reconstruct a fundamental aspect of existence—a process equivalent to performing dental surgery on yourself with a pocket mirror and a staple remover.

Consider: approximately 40 million Americans switch careers entirely every four years. A third of marriages end in divorce. Companies born in garages become global behemoths, while century-old institutions vanish overnight. Your carefully constructed identity—professional, relational, geographic—can disintegrate with a medical diagnosis, economic shift, or technological revolution.2

We perceive these upheavals as anomalies. Exceptions. Aberrations from a presumed trajectory of stability. Yet overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise: reinvention isn't an irregularity—it's life's baseline condition. And here we all are, wandering around shocked—SHOCKED!—when our meticulously constructed reality collapses around us, the identical characters in a cosmic drama where we've missed every single foreshadowing moment leading to our inevitable third-act crisis, the perpetually surprised audience member who's watched eleven consecutive Agatha Christie adaptations and still gasps when the kindly vicar turns out to be the murderer.

The Sandcastle Principle

Imagine your life as a sandcastle on a beach. You've built turrets, moats, walls—intricate structures representing your career, relationships, beliefs, and habits. You may have constructed it near what appeared to be a safe distance from water, but all sandcastles exist in relationship to an immutable fact: tides always return.

This metaphor illuminates why even carefully planned lives encounter inevitable dissolution. When waves reach your construction—through illness, loss, technological disruption, financial collapse—you face a choice: frantically rebuild exactly what was lost (impossible, unless you've somehow discovered time travel while the rest of us weren't looking), abandon creating altogether (surrender, the medieval French knight's final act, the contemporary adult's temporary temptation), or begin something new (reinvention).3

What if we recognized impermanence not as failure but as an opening? What if dissolution constituted a necessary precondition for growth? What if—and stay with me here—what if we've been looking at everything exactly backward?

Unwilling Metamorphosis

My first significant reinvention occurred during my time at UCSD. I was diligently preparing for medical school—my future seemingly predetermined—until I slept through a Chem 168 midterm. Unable to concoct a sufficiently convincing excuse for a retake, I watched my medical school aspirations disintegrate. In response, I did what made sense in my disoriented state: pivoted to physics, a field where I'd accumulated enough credits to make a transition.

A brief stint at JPL afterward revealed something profound: physics fascinated me intellectually but repelled me professionally. I loved the numbers but not the work. This realization propelled me toward statistics, while simultaneously nurturing a budding hobby in magic—where I'd begun making modest waves within its insular community—and an embryonic comedy career consisting primarily of nervous performances at sparsely attended open mics.

From these uncertain beginnings, my reinvention continued. My dreams of becoming a professional magician and radio comedian gradually yielded to adult pragmatism. I pivoted to become a data analyst at Titleist, accumulating specialized knowledge and technical skills—only to find myself drawn toward completely different fields soon after.

So continued my adult metamorphosis—unplanned, unwanted, and ultimately transformative.

I transitioned to Audio Video, developed new expertise, built connections, only to reinvent myself yet again when I moved into IT. Through these transformations—from pre-med student to physicist to aspiring entertainer to corporate data analyst to audio-visual specialist to IT professional—I discovered the most important thing about myself: reinvention itself constitutes my most valuable skill.4

When discussing reinvention, we naturally focus on external forces: economic shifts, technological disruption, relationship dissolution. However, equally significant are internal revolutions—moments when you discover fundamental misalignments between who you believed yourself to be and who you actually are.

Have you pursued a path because it aligned with your authentic self, or because it satisfied external expectations?

Which aspects of your identity would survive if your professional role disappeared tomorrow?

If you lost everything—career, relationships, status—which core values would remain?

These aren't rhetorical questions. Or rather, they're precisely rhetorical questions in every meaningful sense—questions designed not for answer but for contemplation, for sitting with discomfort, for allowing yourself to meditate between the certainties where growth actually happens.

The Psychology of Starting Over

Psychological research identifies reinvention as a specialized form of grief processing. When losing a fundamental aspect of identity, we experience stages mirroring bereavement: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—a sequence as mandatory as airport security, though less efficient and with significantly worse snack options.

What distinguishes successful reinvention from permanent devastation? Research points toward a psychological phenomenon called "post-traumatic growth"—positive psychological changes experienced following intensely challenging circumstances, which is academia's polite way of saying "congratulations, your life exploded, but if you manage not to become permanently unhinged, you might develop muscles you never knew you had."

Studies indicate individuals who frame dissolution as opportunity rather than failure demonstrate measurably higher resilience. When viewing reinvention as evolution rather than collapse, we access neurological pathways associated with curiosity instead of fear.5 The roller coaster and the mobile death trap—identical track, radically different neurochemistry, both producing the same involuntary screaming.

How might shifting your relationship with change alter your experience of it? Would you willingly dissolve aspects of your current life if doing so created space for unknown possibilities? Can you imagine yourself embracing uncertainty with curiosity rather than terror? Does asking yourself multiple consecutive questions in italics actually change anything whatsoever about how you view yourself in relation to inevitable change?

Inspiration from Unexpected Sources

Consider Harland Sanders—yes, Kentucky Fried Chicken's founder. His biography reveals a man who weathered multiple career collapses: railroad worker, lawyer (without formal education), insurance salesman, gas station operator, and eventually restaurateur.

At sixty-five, when most contemporaries contemplated retirement, Sanders found himself nearly homeless after a highway reroute eliminated his restaurant's traffic. Instead of surrendering, he began again—driving across America, sleeping in his car, experiencing rejection after rejection while offering his chicken recipe to restaurants.

His breakthrough arrived at sixty-eight—an age when society expects vocational decline, not genesis.6

Sanders exemplifies reinvention's core paradox: what appears catastrophic often creates conditions for unprecedented growth. Without his restaurant's failure, the international brand would never have emerged.

The Biology of Reinvention

Our resistance toward beginning again contradicts biological wisdom. Consider a forest after wildfire—destruction creates precisely appropriate conditions for renewal. Some pine species produce cones remaining sealed until intense heat melts their resin, releasing seeds specifically evolved to thrive in post-fire environments. These trees—the ultimate evolutionary "break glass in case of emergency" operators—while we humans become the emergency protocol of broken glass, breakdown, and possibly a weeklong pizza-fueled appointment cancellation spree.

What magnificent possibilities might your dissolution release?

This perspective transforms how we view seeming catastrophes. Job loss becomes curriculum for developing adaptability, the deep-end swimming lesson minus the actual drowning. Relationship endings become invitations toward self-knowledge, the more poetic alternative to "six months of sobbing through old photos at 3 AM." Health challenges become portals to presence, the beautiful reframing of "the universe threatening to revoke your membership in the Being Alive Club."

When inevitable waves reach your sandcastle, remember: dissolution constitutes half of creation's cycle.

What aspects of your current identity might benefit from dissolution?

Where might you need permission to begin again?

Or—and I acknowledge how uncomfortable this question might be—what if your current identity itself represents an outdated survival mechanism? What if who you believe yourself to be actually functions as an elaborate defense system against becoming who you might be?7

Navigating the Labyrinth of Reinvention

I once believed mastering reinvention meant developing a formula—a step-by-step process for navigating dissolution. Write listicles. Create frameworks. Build systems. The American mind gravitates toward methodologies, toward numbered processes promising transformation through mechanical application, the life-altering reinvention no different than IKEA bookshelf assembly, albeit with heavier existential dread and fewer Allen wrenches.

Yet genuine reinvention resists systematization precisely because it operates in threshold spaces—liminal territories between who you were and who you're becoming. Can you inhabit uncertainty long enough to discover what emerges when you stop frantically reaching for familiar shores? Can you survive the excruciating discomfort of not knowing who you are anymore, the adult reincarnation of adolescence, complete with its back pain, mortgage payments, and haunting awareness that youth was never the infinite resource you once believed?

Consider uncertainty as territory rather than obstacle. Can you befriend "I don't know yet" as temporary address rather than existential crisis? Can you recognize how your previous identity likely developed through similar uncertainty—which memory has conveniently erased?

Think of capabilities you've developed through previous experiences: pattern recognition, communication, analysis, empathy, persistence. How might these capacities transfer to entirely new contexts? A physician's diagnostic thinking enhances consulting. A teacher's communication abilities transfer to marketing. A parent's multitasking capacity prepares them for project management.8

Perhaps most challenging: can you embrace temporary incompetence? Reinvention demands willingness to become beginner again. Our educational system trains us to avoid mistakes at all costs, yet expertise develops exclusively through progression through incompetence, not avoidance of it. Can you find freedom in not knowing? In making mistakes? In asking questions others might consider obvious?

Have you considered finding community among fellow beginners? Others navigating similar transitions provide both practical support and—perhaps more crucially—normalization of your experience. Their perspective reminds you feelings of disorientation signal progress, not failure.

Consider documenting your metamorphosis. Journal about transformation. Future challenges become manageable when you possess evidence of previous successful reinventions. Your past self left breadcrumbs for your future self to follow when lost in forests of uncertainty.

Next time waves approach your sandcastle, remember this: the universe operates through cycles of creation and dissolution. Beginning anew represents life's fundamental rhythm—not aberration from it. Your capacity for reinvention constitutes your most reliable resource in a world where change represents the only constant.9

In our desperate scramble for permanence, we have forgotten a fundamental truth: we are not meant to be monuments—fixed, immutable, eternal. We are rivers—flowing, changing, carving new paths when old ones become impassable, occasionally flooding nearby towns and devastating local property values. The dissolution of what you've built isn't failure—it's preparation. The universe isn't destroying your creations; it's clearing space for what you haven't yet imagined, the overzealous interior decorator tossing your furniture before asking about that heirloom armchair.

Look back at every reinvention you've survived. Each transition that once appeared catastrophic now reveals itself as necessary passage. Each collapse created precise conditions for emergence. Each ending made room for beginning. Your various selves stack inside you—the pre-med student nested within the physicist nested within the comedian nested within the data analyst nested within the IT professional—each iteration simultaneously complete and incomplete, finished and unfinished.

Your life has been preparing you for this moment—teaching you how to die and be reborn, how to release and receive, how to transform destruction into creation. You've been practicing metamorphosis all along without realizing it, the nightly dress rehearsal for death every time you fall asleep, minus the drooling and plus the existential significance.

Perhaps this is what it means to be fully human: not building fortresses against change, but developing capacity to move with it—to recognize impermanence not as enemy but as teacher. Not clinging to who we were but curious about who we might become. Not monuments but metamorphosis.

So when the tide inevitably approaches your sandcastle, remember: you are not what you've built. You are the builder.