I, like many other young adults, have gone through multiple phases in short amounts of time. It’s all a part of growing up and discovering who you want to be in this crazy world. However, after some downward spirals and realizing that you aren’t where you want to be in life, you quickly make a sweeping declaration: I need to start again with a clean slate.

Changing your mentality about life is not particularly easy. Sometimes it takes some life changes to experience this feeling of rebirth. Maybe you just change up your hairstyle or try a new restaurant. A little social media boycott may do the trick. Or maybe you detach yourself from toxic people in your life. Perhaps you reconcile with friends and family. As for myself, after I feel down in my luck needing a reset in my mindset, I take an absurdly long shower.

After some twist and turns, ups and downs in my life in the past few months, I found myself one day sitting on the floor of the shower looking at a shampoo bottle. One word in particular stood out to me on the bottle: clean. My thoughts began to wander, thinking about the word and what it really means to be clean. Clean can be used to describe many things: a room, a look, a car, a reputation, a permeant record, a state of mind, and of course a slate. Then a question arose in my mind, “Can a person’s metaphorical slate ever be completely clean?” Of course you can tell yourself that you are starting over, you are going to clear you mind, and you are going to be different. This is all fine, good, and inspiring. But, what about the last chapters of your life? Where do they go?

I don’t think an individual can ever have a completely ‘clean slate.’ As much as you try to wipe your subconscious plate clean, bacteria of who you used to be lingers on the edges of the surface. This makes up who you are now. Experiences, relationships, positive peaks, negative episodes, faults, and whatever else life has thrown at you, will always linger as emotional scaring on your heart. Sounds dark and twisted, right? Not exactly. Without the past versions of yourself, personal growth wouldn’t be possible. There wouldn’t be any drive to mold yourself. If a reset button can just be pressed, how will you ever learn to climb out of the depths of your life?

Before making some serious life changes to cleanse and improve upon yourself, think about the dreadful streaks on your slate: the mistakes, the failures, the pain, the bad stretches, and the “oh my gosh I’m so dumb” times in your life. What did you learn from all of those experience? What from those will you take with you into your next chapters in your life? I know from my own experiences, that those epic catastrophes are worth taking note of before trying to scrub them from your subconscious. So, is it really best to start with a clean slate? Or are we better off regrouping and rebuilding upon ourselves?