The seductive fantasy of reinvention

To burn it down or build on it.

I spent my bakery shift yesterday so fixated on a miso brown butter cookie that I could no longer tell the two of us apart. Kind of like when you take mushrooms and your face reflected in the bathroom mirror becomes the most interesting thing in the world. (You are me?) We’re going to launch an ice cream sandwich at the cafe soon, and the “bread” needs to be chewy, salty, and structurally integral enough to stand up to a hefty plop of the good stuff.

My first attempt tasted like burnt toast drenched in maple syrup (complimentary), but lacked miso’s characteristic funk. The second was more assertive, yet reminiscent of a vinyl record — too large and somehow also too thin. Finally, after I added 15 grams of flour and another 10 grams of malted milk powder, we had a winner. The diameter of my fist. Crispy edges with a pliable center that won’t break teeth when frozen. A salted caramel milkshake type of thing.

Later that night, my husband and I had an argument (even though I brought him the three best cookies from my experiments). Nothing wild. Nothing we haven’t bickered over before. Nothing, certainly, unfixable. And despite loving him with every cell in my body, the chaotic little demon voice inside my skull wondered, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to start fresh?”

I have a propensity toward this sort of irrational thinking. The moment something reveals a flaw — or, perhaps, reveals one in me — I start fantasizing about its replacement. A different country. A new career. A version of myself who hasn’t spent the last 35 years weaving a mortifying daisy-chain of mishaps.

This impulse to reinvent is entirely unexceptional. Whole-ass industries peddling yearly planners and motivational cross-stitch patterns have been built around it — flotsam of capitalism fueled by the seductive belief that starting over grants us the chance to become the people we’ve always wanted to be. A task, apparently, impossible without sipping your morning coffee from a mug purchased to remind you that “EVERY DAY IS A NEW BEGINNING.”

The same idea has permeated our virtual worlds, too. As Celia Mattison argues in The Ann Friedman Weekly, her obsession with playing Animal Crossing is a way to “build the perfect farm, the perfect civilization, the perfect cult.” To mess up and be granted infinite clean slates.

In the kitchen, I’ll happily extend patience to a miso cookie, finagling a sticky lump of dough into its best self. I expect iteration. I trust the cookie has potential. And I keep at it because I am not personally devastated by its insistence to spread to the size of dinner plate.

I have the opposite reaction in my own life, transmuting everyday imperfections into failures. A tough conversation with my husband, a grueling stretch at work, a body on the fritz. These moments don’t just feel mildly frustrating; they feel diagnostic. They land in my nervous system as verdicts on my own worth. And so I dream of tossing out the metaphorical dough to spare myself the ego-shattering work of tweaking the recipe.

While growth begs for diligent revision, perfectionism dreams of demolition. It wants transformation without discomfort, a blank page rather than a red-lined draft. But the desire to get everything right, without exertion, is unreasonable and self-defeating. It keeps us focused on some imagined utopian future while making it impossible to appreciate or to improve our current reality.

Besides, as Mattison writes, “Of all the lines of dialogue from Mad Men I have memorized, something Henry Francis says in season four rings in my head the most often: ‘There is no fresh start! Lives carry on!’” The hard part is learning to carry on with the one we’ve got.

Anyway! Three questions for you:

• Where in your life are you most tempted to burn it all down and start over?

• What small adjustment might be more useful than a dramatic reinvention?

• Can you think of a time when starting over really was the right call? How did you know?