WE all want a clean slate. To reset our lives and begin anew. To draw once more on a blank canvas, and leave the one marred by our past. 

Most often, the desire for a fresh start intensifies whenever we face adversities. Failure compels some to pack up and move to a new city, seeking solace in the unfamiliar. Humiliation drives others to change their identities and hide behind new names. Mistakes ignite a longing for a reset button, an offer of a new game. 

When we stumble, the weight of consequences can feel suffocating. We feel a desperate urge to escape. We long to turn to a new page, craving to leave behind what no longer serves us, without the burden of facing it again. 

But can you truly call it a fresh start if you’re running away?

What we can learn from Taylor Swift

One evening, while listening to Taylor Swift’s Clean from her album 1989, I had a realization. 

Clean is a song about a fresh start. Through it, Taylor tells her journey of healing from a previous relationship. It is a personal narrative about her struggles, pain, and eventual recovery. 

But for a song about a ‘new beginning’, Clean was filled with images of an ‘end’—flowers dying of thirst, a lost war, butterflies turning to dust, and pictures being swept away by floods. 

Even the chorus itself carries a sense of death. Taylor sings about drowning, her lungs filling with water. She tries to scream, to beg for an escape, but, as she sings:

“No one heard a thing.”

Yet, what’s fascinating about her lyricism was the paradox. 

Her chorus presents a poignant contradiction: Taylor was experiencing intense pain. She screams in the song: 

“Rain came pouring down…”

But this moment of raw vulnerability, when she felt the most broken, also became a moment when she found a sense of healing:

 “When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe.”

Taylor is no stranger to reinvention. As one of the world’s biggest pop stars under constant media scrutiny, she has repeatedly shown the ability to rise above challenges and redefine herself. Time and again, she has managed to embrace a ‘fresh start,’ even with her history laid bare for all to see.

But what does this tell us and how does it relate to our view of ‘fresh start’? 

Well, if we take Taylor at her word (or her song), she suggests that healing comes not from running away, but from facing the pain head-on. She says that in order to have a new beginning—-a “Clean” slate—one must acknowledge their suffering and confront whatever ending lies ahead. 

This is a truth that I think resonates deeply. A new beginning naturally stems from an end. To start a new chapter, the final word of the previous one must first be written. For a new phase to begin properly, then the one that comes before it must reach a conclusion.

Running away does not mean a fresh start. When you run, you don’t actually begin anew; You’re merely putting the situation in a suspended animation. Your refusal to bring things to closure will only result in prolonged agony. Your start is not a genuine beginning because you’ll always be looking over your shoulder, afraid that whatever it is you’re running from would finally catch up to you. 

A fresh start requires not only the courage to face the past but also the bravery to bring it to an end.

Furthermore, Taylor also implied that fresh starts are often not perfect. In the bridge, she sang:

“Ten months sober, I must admit

Just because you’re clean, don’t mean you don’t miss it

This means that healing will not always be a linear path. Sometimes, you would find yourself longing for the nostalgia of the past, even when you have chosen to end it. 

But in the same verse, Taylor also sang:

“Ten months older, I won’t give in

Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it.”

This line implies that a fresh start calls for a certain learning. When you begin a new life, then you should not be coming to it empty-handed. You should take whatever it is that you’ve learned in the past— that’s how you become better.

Fresh start means growth

In the end, a true fresh start is not about running from the past but making peace with it. As we’ve learned from Taylor Swift’s Clean, healing comes from acknowledging pain and closing chapters, not avoiding them. 

A genuine beginning requires growth—- and growth comes when we decide to face our struggles and leave our comfort zone. Only then can we start anew.