There are very few times in life when you’re given the opportunity to start fresh.

I’m not talking about showing up on the first day of school with the sense that you’ve completely reinvented yourself over the course of the summer, when you’re really just the same old you, only with freshly sharpened pencils and a few extra freckles.

What I’m talking about is a completely clean slate, on the level of moving to a new city where not a single person knows your name. That’s the kind of change that’s coursing through my life as I write this.

All summer long, I existed in the uncomfortable space between the life I’d been living and the unknowable future that I felt myself moving toward. I felt my mind being rewired as I reexamined stories that I’d told myself for years, and forced myself to be honest about pieces that no longer fit into place.

At the beginning of the summer, I was living in a house encircled by the Charles River. Every morning, I took the train into the city, then walked back through the front door eleven hours later. Most nights, I’d make dinner, do the dishes, then find a quiet place to write until it was time to go to sleep.

I wasn’t in the business of questioning whether or not I was happy with this life that I’d created—it was mine, and I’d worked hard for it. I had all of the things that my younger self had desired—the things I felt like I was supposed to want: the house, the relationship, the career, the dog. That was enough, I had decided, resigning myself to the idea that stability was better than uncertainty, even when contentment felt far away.

Rather than asking myself whether I was truly happy, I viewed my life in snapshots: The surface of the river glimmering in the late afternoon light as I paddled my red canoe through the water. Slicing through the flesh of the heirloom tomatoes that I grew from seeds in my garden every year. The sunlight filtering through the tree branches as I read a book in the hammock. Laughter reverberating off the walls of the dining room as we passed serving platters around the table, heaped with enough food for twenty friends, sometimes more.

But whether by happenstance or design, I spent much of the summer away from the life that I loved, living a different kind of existence altogether. I drove through the lush hills of Vermont in May, then traced the coastal edges of Maine in June. In July, I slept in a brownstone in Brooklyn and fell in love with a tiny Italian restaurant down the street, where I’d sit with a notebook and a glass of prosecco as the sun set.

I pictured what my life would look like in each of these places. I saw an alternate version myself strolling down the tree-lined streets of Park Slope, holding my dog’s leash in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. I imagined falling asleep every night to the sound of waves crashing against the rocky coast of Bailey Island.

Are you happy? I asked my other selves. They’d respond with a coy smile, as if to say, Are you?

Once I started, I couldn’t stop dreaming of having a fresh start in a new place—fashioning my life around the things that I loved, with no sense of obligation toward anyone or anything else. This sense of infinite possibility unfolding before me made me feel lighter and freer than I ever had before.

This made returning home after each adventure incredibly hard. I felt a deep sense of mourning every time that I had to close the door on an alternate version of my life that I’d come to love. I felt myself undergoing a kind of metamorphosis, and I couldn’t force my mind back into its old shape once it had expanded to include so many new possibilities. I felt like a stranger inside my own home; and the commitments that I’d made suddenly seemed reckless and irrational.

Finally, it came time to admit that the bravest thing that I could do was to set fire to my stable existence and escape.

In the space of a single month, I crumpled up my set-in-stone future plans and started plotting out the rest of my life on a blank sheet of paper, one week at a time. I held each one of my belongings and commitments in my hands and considered its value; and I said goodbye to far more than I kept. The grief that I felt for the life that I left behind was heavier some days than others; but it has always been outweighed by the sense that a fuller, more fulfilling life is waiting for me just over the horizon.

In this version of my life, I share an apartment downtown with my dog and two cats. My shelves are stacked with books whose stories are waiting to be revealed; and there’s a map on the wall with hundreds of pins marking the sights I have yet to see. Most nights, I lean over the edge of my porch as the sun sets over Boston Harbor, a glass of wine in my hand, reminding myself that it’s never too late to start again.

—

Over the course of the summer—even before I decided to set my life on fire and start over—I found myself devising a list that I called ‘Rules for My New Life.’ These rules continue to help me view complicated, emotional matters in black and white: Does this bring me closer to the life that I deserve, or farther away from it?

So, whether you’re figuring things out on your own for the first time or are happily committed, here’s the advice that I’ve discovered to create the life you want to live.

How to Create the Life You Want to Live: 10 Tips

1. Your feelings are your responsibility, and other people’s are theirs.

2. Your free time is for things you need or want to do—cut the rest out.

3. Change is always good—embrace it, don’t fight it. What’s ahead is always better than what you’ve left behind.

4. Only invite someone to share your life if they add to it.

5. State your feelings unambiguously and unapologetically, then let the other person decide whether or not they want to act on them.

6. Don’t make decisions based on what you think other people are thinking.

7. Money is for bills and travel (or whatever makes you genuinely happy), and the rest gets saved or invested.

8. Food should either nourish your body or your soul.

9. You are not your job, nor are you what you create; so even when you fail, it doesn’t diminish who you are.

10. Don’t be afraid to start over if you’ve ended up in a place that doesn’t feel authentic to you. Just because something doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean that it was a failure. Be ruthless in carving out the life that you want—you have nothing to lose.

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We each face the same lessons over and over again in life until we’ve learned them—only then can we move on to the next stage of our development. Until now, I had never been truly alone a day in my life; but I always wondered what versions of my life might be waiting for me on the other side of that door.

I know exactly which lesson I’m meant to be learning right now: How to create a life of my own—one that I enjoy so much that I’m not so quick to compromise it for whoever’s in my life at the time. Learning to be happy on my own has its ups and downs, but I know that becoming well-acquainted with that discomfort is the most important work that I could possibly be doing right now. As a wise person once wrote, “I love the person I am because I fought to become her.”

I would love to hear your stories on creating a life that you love. Share your experiences and wisdom in the comments. <3

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