Of course the thing about beginning again — about starting over midway through is that you have to be willing to watch yourself die.

I learned that from writing this newsletter.

Next week, it will be three years since I launched the cereal aisle, and I think the most important thing I have learned in the time since is that rebirth is on the other side of death.

But also, that if you want to live again, you really have to let yourself die.

So many times in the early days of cereal, after taking a parade of pictures of myself with the timer on my camera phone, I would sit down on the edge of the couch where I’m usually standing to pose and I would think to myself: You are such a loser.

I’d think about Man Repeller and the big Soho office I used to walk into every morning, about how at peak, I employed almost 25 people to work at a media company that I had started when I was 20 years old.

Then I’d return to present awareness, where some days I’d walk to a coffee shop situated right above a subway station 11 blocks away, just to feel like I had somewhere to rush to, then come home to take pictures with the selfie timer in the silence of my living room while my twin daughters were at school and my husband was at work and that’s all I had planned for the day and I would think: how did I let myself fail so completely?

And days, even weeks, would go by in the beginning where I wouldn’t speak words out loud until I had to go pick up my kids and on those days, I remembered how big my life used to feel. How many new people freckled my days. That there were always questions that had to be answered. That I was the one to answer them! There was no time to ask what I was doing with my life. No time to answer either.

In my old life, I believed, I had ascended to the top of a mountain and there was a throne there where I used to sit, and now here I was ten years older, in the valley of beginnings, in a ditch on the floor, just me and my butt and the ground beneath us.

from Three years of cereal by Leandra Medine Cohen