Starting Over at 28

Because we thought we'd have it all figured out by now, didn't we?

I am starting over at 28. Fresh off the heels of—dare I say—the “worst” year of my life. I sacrificed the life I had grown a bit too passive and comfortable in—Brooklyn—to seek better prospects of stability, health, and love in Los Angeles, just 30 miles from where I grew up.

On my 27th birthday, I drank too much natural wine at a boutique hotel my partner had booked for us—an architectural dream of a place—and cried. Cried about how I wasn’t where I was supposed to be at this age. She didn’t know how good she had it then. She still had savings, still had unemployment benefits, and yes, her part-time job sucked, but she had no idea she was on the verge of getting— and losing the “big” one. She didn’t know things could—and would—get worse.

I was supposed to be back in Mexico for this birthday but couldn’t afford it. Much like my physical self had been wiped and uprooted from everything it knew, so had my bank account. The one silver lining is that the money coming in now is "clean"—earned from a job I like, one that respects me and doesn’t send me into some of my worst crash-outs on record. But still, I was stuck in L.A.—a city, much like me, rebuilding itself from (literal) ashes.

This year, I made a promise to myself: No matter where I was or if I was dead broke and forced to spend the entire day at home alone, I wouldn’t feel the way I did last year. I was going to celebrate my solar return. I was going to celebrate how far I had come and recognize the accomplishment of simply making it to this day.

But most importantly, I promised myself I would choose to think differently.

For context: I spent the first half of my 27th year in a deep spiritual psychosis—triggered by an unmonitored, unmedicated deep-dive into a neural manifestation program (one that even has its own dedicated Reddit snark page). The latter half, I spent completely detached from spirit, from any belief that my life had meaning or that I had the power to change my reality. I was stuck in victim mode, convinced that everything I dreamed of was so far out of reach that I stopped dreaming entirely.

But my 28th birthday was the first day in six months that I had the spiritual, emotional, and mental ability to choose. To choose to feel differently.

I recognize that choice isn’t always easy. We live in a post-capitalist, new-age culture obsessed with the outcome, rather than the journey it takes to get there. A culture that demands we shove our feelings down in favor of toxic positivity. But every time I’ve found myself in a dark night of the soul—forced to sit long and hard with my shadow—every time I’ve felt too incapacitated by pain and grief to choose… when the moment to choose finally arrives, I realize I couldn’t have gotten here without the darkness.

And then, in the first rains of the Los Angeles winter, the sun finally came out.

Because I sat with my darkness—the grief of losing my other half, my only sister—I chose to seek the unknown. No matter how uncomfortable it felt (and still feels), I am choosing to sit in the in-between. The silence of not knowing where I’m meant to be, but also knowing I’m no longer who I was. And in that stillness, I recognize again: I get to choose.

And this choice comes entirely from within. There’s nothing external that feels like a foundation right now. And that’s exactly how it was meant to be.

I was meant to lose everything. To detach completely from the illusion that a job or a partner would come to save me. Because I finally had to learn—I am the one who saves myself. Every time.

And that’s what makes choosing me so monumental.