Real growth hits like a pressure cooker. Individual adversities and tragedies aside, everyday life activities become a persistent pressure test. How you walk, the places you work out, even the clothes you wear start to feel different. Tight. As though they’re challenging you to really notice them, examine them. The pressure builds, and builds, until one day you find yourself staring down at a pile of clothes you used to love and thinking: This isn’t me anymore.

Everything else follows. The career, the outdated friendships, past loves, old dreams — they all just feel stale. You can see the ghost of yourself wafting in and around coffee shops you used to love. Shows you used to watch. You begin this purge of everything that was until you’re left with this blank canvas. But one day, that canvas becomes less of a blank slate and more of a mirror. Because when what falls clears, what’s meant for you appears.

And chances are? Some of that involves the old you that lived in the pants you just threw away. Not all of her — no. But a small part. The dreaming part.

In my own life, I have spent the better half of four years stripping away old layers. The real test was 2024, where I stripped myself down to my roots and realized that where I was planted — in all areas of life — wasn’t where I was meant to be. I threw out old clothes and numbers, old books and old themes. Outdated patterns hit the floor like those discarded clothing articles. Everything went — except the boundaries and self-worth. Those cemented like shiny, new statues. I burned everything to the ground and turned toward tomorrow.

Only tomorrow arrived with the surprising flavor of yesterday.

One day I found an old writing journal before law school. That journal revealed all my pre-law school plans which, wouldn’t you guess, never included being an actual lawyer. Old me wanted to write, and teach, and enter advocacy work. She wanted the degree for the knowledge; not the status or the people. She knew her course. It was jarring how much that old me resembled the new me.

Shortly after that, I was contacted by an old school friend who I thought drifted for good. Then, I was urged to reach out to someone I resolved to never talk to again because this passion for old, unfinished hobbies lit up inside me — and that person was the gateway to rediscovering it. In the aftermath of all the rubble — in the shiny, pressurized and cooled rock borne of release — was someone I knew. She waited there, with that trademark uproarious laugh and knowing smile, and a shrewd twinkle in her eye, that said: “Why not?”

The answer? Because it seems like an insult to everything I just grew beyond.

Growing into new things can feel like a total abandonment of old dreams. So much so, that moving back toward what was can feel like an insult. Why grow, if only just to turn back?

The thing is that there is beauty in youth and naiveté — in that old you that accrued dreams like pennies, allowing them to carelessly collect until one day they amounted to something. They just kept building in the background, right underneath your nose, until they were ready to be examined again. Until you had cleared enough to see the old version of yourself with brand new brand eyes. De novo, as it were. The old things that emerged were not as they once were. They are different this time with new potential — a new shine. The key to reaping that potential is to approach the old dreams through the eyes of your new patterns and habits.

It’s funny — how much potential those old, silly dreams and connections carry.

All it takes to embrace them is a new set of eyes.