Dear friend,
I cannot tell you how many Mondays I have spent starting over. Monday always seemed to hold so much promise. It was going to be the day I finally got serious again. I would eat better, exercise consistently, drink more water, and stop doing all the things I had decided were keeping me from becoming the person I wanted to be. Sometimes I made it through Monday feeling hopeful and determined. Sometimes that determination lasted for weeks. And sometimes, if I am being truthful, the plan I had been so certain about in the morning was already beginning to unravel by Monday afternoon.
For years, I thought the problem was that I simply lacked consistency. I believed that if I could become disciplined enough, motivated enough, or frustrated enough with where I was, eventually I would find the version of myself who could finally stick with it. What I did not understand was how much of my struggle was tied to the way I thought about failure. Somewhere along the way, I had learned to believe that if I was not doing something consistently, I was failing at it altogether.
So if I ate differently than I had planned, I had blown it. If I missed several days of exercise, I was off track. If life became stressful and I returned to old ways of coping, I would look at everything I had been doing and think, Here we go again. And almost immediately, another starting line would appear somewhere in the future. I would start again tomorrow. Or Monday. Or at the beginning of the next month. Or after the holidays. There was always some future version of me who was apparently going to be much better at taking care of herself than the woman standing in the kitchen right then.
Maybe you know that feeling too. Maybe you have spent years moving between trying very hard and feeling as though you have failed, only to gather yourself up and make another promise that this time will be different. There is something exhausting about living that way because every time we struggle, we feel as though we have been sent all the way back to the beginning.
Lately, though, I have been learning something that is changing the way I think about consistency: I do not have to start over. I can simply return.
There is such a difference between those two things. Starting over makes me feel as though everything that came before somehow stopped counting. It gives one difficult meal, one missed walk, or one hard week far more power than it deserves. Returning allows me to remember that the next choice is still mine. I do not have to punish yesterday with what I do today, and I do not have to wait for some perfect future moment before I begin caring for myself again. If it is Wednesday afternoon and I realize I have not been taking very good care of myself, Wednesday afternoon is a perfectly good time to return.
I think this is one of the reasons the idea of returning has become so meaningful to me spiritually as well. Scripture is filled with people who wandered, struggled, forgot, became discouraged, and needed to turn back toward God. Yet again and again, we see a God who invites His people to return. He does not ask them to travel backward and erase every wrong turn before they can come near Him again. His mercy meets them where they are. Lamentations tells us that His mercies are new every morning, and I have begun to think differently about what that means in my own life. A new morning is not God handing me another opportunity to prove that this time I can finally be perfect. It is another reminder that grace is still here.
Maybe caring for our bodies can begin to look a little more like that.
Instead of making another dramatic promise to change everything, perhaps we can simply ask what caring for ourselves looks like in the next moment. Maybe it is drinking the water we have been forgetting to drink, making ourselves a nourishing meal, taking a walk after several days of being still, or going to bed because our bodies are genuinely tired. None of those things are dramatic enough to feel like a grand new beginning, and I think that may be exactly the point. A life is not built only in grand beginnings. It is built in thousands of ordinary returns.
I am beginning to believe that I misunderstood consistency for a very long time. I thought consistency meant never getting off track. Now I think it may have much more to do with what I do when I realize that I have.
Consistency means I return.
That thought has given me more hope than another Monday morning ever did. It means I do not have to become a woman who never struggles. I do not have to perfectly manage food, exercise, emotions, or life. I can become a woman who notices when she has drifted away from caring for herself and gently finds her way back.
So, friend, if you have been telling yourself that you need to start over, I wonder if you could let yourself put that burden down today. You do not need a new week, a new month, or a new version of yourself. You do not need to make up for yesterday or prove anything about tomorrow. You can simply ask yourself what one caring choice looks like right now and begin there.
And if tomorrow does not go the way you hoped, grace will still be there.
You can return again.
​

With grace,

Autumn

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P.S. I would love to know what this brings up for you. Is there an area where you have been telling yourself you need to “start over”? You can reply to this email and tell me. Maybe what you really need isn't another beginning at all. Maybe you simply need permission to return.