Starting Over When You Didn’t Choose To

Something just happened that I didn’t plan for, didn’t ease into, didn’t prepare for.

I went to record a podcast and…Everything’s gone.

E V E R Y T H I N G

GarageBand projects, templates, intro, outro, all of it. Not one file, not one folder—everything that made the system run. Not in iCloud, not on the desktop, not a single “.band” file to be found anywhere on my Mac at all.

The structure that let me sit down, hit record, and go without thinking about mechanics is gone. And when something like that happens, the reaction is immediate.

You don’t pause. You don’t evaluate. You go straight to fixing it.
“Can any of it be retrieved?”
“How quickly can I get back to where I was?”

“How fast can I rebuild this?”

That reaction feels like you’re doing something about it. You start trying to fix it, piece it back together, get it back to what it was. There’s a pull to restore the version that was just there, like speed alone could reverse it.

That’s where it breaks.

You’re trying to repair something that isn’t there anymore.

There isn’t.

There’s a koan that captures this cleanly.

A monk asks, “How does an enlightened person return to the ordinary world?”

The response: a broken mirror never reflects again, and fallen flowers never go back to the branch.

That’s not abstract. That’s how this works. Once something changes, it’s changed. Once you see something differently, you don’t unsee it. Once something breaks, you don’t go back to the version before it broke. You can build something new. You can adapt. You can restructure. But you are not returning to the previous state.

And most people fight that harder than anything else. Because what they want is restoration. They want it to feel the same again. They want the structure they had. They want to skip the part where they have to do something again that they already did once. And when that’s not available—and it isn’t—they stall.

That’s where people actually get stuck. Not in what happened. In refusing to accept that there’s no going back.

THE COST OF HAVING TO DO IT AGAIN

When everything disappears like that, it exposes something most people don’t think about until it’s gone. The template wasn’t just a file. It was structure. It was predictability. It was one less layer of friction. It was the difference between sitting down and doing the work versus sitting down and having to rebuild the environment just to start. And now all of that is gone, and the friction shows up immediately.

Now you have to think about levels again. Timing. Setup. Flow. You have to rebuild the system before you can even do the thing the system was built to support. And underneath all of that is a reaction that doesn’t sound dramatic, but it drives a lot of behavior.

“I don’t want to do this again.”

Not because you can’t. Because you already did. Because you already solved this problem. Because you already built this once, and now you’re being asked to build it again, and that feels unnecessary. It feels like repeating work that should already be done. That’s where most people slow down or stop.

You see this everywhere. Someone builds a routine, falls out of it, and restarting feels heavier than starting the first time—not because it’s objectively harder, but because they already know what it takes. Someone leaves a bad relationship, and the idea of going through that process again—learning someone, building trust, risking disappointment—feels exhausting. Someone gets sober, slips, and now rebuilding momentum feels like too much, not because they don’t know how, but because they already proved that they could do it and still lost it.

So they stall. They delay. They negotiate. Not because they’re incapable. Because they don’t want to pay the cost again.

That’s the part people keep trying to get around. You don’t get to build something once and be done. You don’t get to solve a problem one time and never see it again. Everything that actually matters gets rebuilt. Not once. Repeatedly. You build it, you lose it, you build it again.

THIS ISN’T A ONE-OFF

This isn’t new. This exact mechanism has shown up at a much higher level before. I got demoted, publicly humiliated, named in a lawsuit, accused of gross misconduct, fired, and told that I was the “cancer of the agency” by a command staff member — all about 60 days after that picture at the top of this article.

That wasn’t a small disruption. That was identity, structure, direction—gone. Everything I had built up to that point disappeared in a way I didn’t choose.

And there’s a version of that story people run. Where you sit in it. Where you make it about what happened to you. Where you stay in the unfairness of it. Where you anchor into the idea that you got knocked off track and now you’re stuck dealing with something you shouldn’t have to deal with.

That version doesn’t build anything.

So I rebuilt. And rebuilding meant starting over in a completely different system. Working at DCF. Learning something new. Not being the guy I used to be. Not having the same structure, the same identity, the same certainty. It didn’t feel clean. It didn’t feel like progress. It felt like starting from the bottom again in a way I didn’t choose.

Same thing here. Different scale. Same mechanism.

And that’s the part most people miss. They think these are separate situations. Losing files is one thing. Losing a career is another. Relationship breakdown is another. Relapse is another. They look different on the surface, but the internal process is the same every time.

Something changes.
You don’t get to go back.
You have to decide what you’re going to do with what’s in front of you now.

THE SHIFT

Once you see that there’s no going back, the question changes.

It’s no longer, “How do I restore what I had?” It becomes, “What do I do with what’s here now?”

That’s where most people either move or stay stuck.

Because when you’re in that space—when the old version is gone and the new one hasn’t been built yet—there’s nothing holding you except your ability to deal with what’s in front of you. And this is where something most people overlook becomes the only thing that actually matters.

You have to trust yourself to adapt.

Not in the outcome. Not in things working out clean. In your ability to handle what shows up next. Because that’s the only thing that actually holds when everything else falls away.

There’s a tendency to look for something external to anchor to. Someone to tell you it’s going to be fine. Some system that guarantees stability. That’s not how this works. The only reliable anchor is your capacity to adjust when things change, because they are going to change.

That doesn’t mean you’re going to like what shows up. It doesn’t mean you won’t feel frustrated, thrown off, or tired of doing something again that you already did once. It means you trust that you can sit in that and still move.

That’s what actually shifts things.

Because another place people get stuck is trying to avoid the emotional side of this. They think the goal is to not feel frustration or disruption. So they try to get rid of the feeling instead of dealing with what’s in front of them. That keeps them stalled longer than necessary.

You don’t have to feel good to rebuild. You don’t have to feel certain to move forward. You don’t have to feel motivated to start again. You just have to be willing to move while those things are there.

WHAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY WORKING WITH

Once you stop trying to undo what already happened, you’re left with one question.

“What do I do with this?”

That’s a cleaner problem. Not easier. Clear.

Because now you’re working with what actually exists. Not trying to recreate something that doesn’t.

Life works like that. Something new shows up and it changes the entire configuration. You don’t get to reject it. You don’t get to go back to the previous setup. The moment it’s there, that’s your reality. Every move you make has to account for it.

If you spend your time trying to undo it, you’re not working with reality. You’re working against it. And that’s where people lose time.

Because now you’re dealing with two things instead of one. The change itself, and your resistance to the change. That second layer is what drags everything out.

Remove that, and the work becomes direct.

THE DECISION

What just happened isn’t unique. It’s just obvious. In most people’s lives, this same pattern is playing out in less visible ways. They lose structure, lose momentum, lose clarity. Something changes, and instead of rebuilding, they spend time trying to get back to something that’s already gone.

That’s the trap.

And the way out of it isn’t control. It’s not better planning. It’s not avoiding disruption. It’s developing a way of operating where you don’t need things to stay the same in order to function.

Where you don’t need certainty to act.

Where you don’t need the old version to move forward.

You work with what’s here.

You rebuild.

You keep moving.

That’s it.