Reinvent Your Life

"Before that, it's just a dream," Edwards says. "But once you write it down, that's the first step into reality."

Tales of Taking the Plunge

Experts and numbers say only so much. Personal anecdotes are what fuel the allure of Starting Over.

Sometimes it's unavoidable. Yodit Girma started over twice. In 1992, her family moved to the United States from Ethiopia because her mother was a political refugee. She was 18 and waitressed to put herself through beauty school. She eventually joined Dupont Circle's Salon Cielo as a hairstylist and two years ago opened her own place, Salon Revive in the U Street corridor, with a co-worker. She has worked full time at Salon Revive since March.

The move from Ethiopia was complete culture shock, says Girma, 32, but opening her own salon was the biggest decision she'd ever made.

"I was doing well where I was, but I was getting to the point where something had to happen," she says. "There was something better out there. It was a challenge. Risk is just one of those things -- you just have to jump."

Sometimes starting over stems from happenstance. While writing code as a freelance software developer in Portland, Ore., William Foster overheard a barista at a coffee shop talking about a modeling job. Since he had an itch to do something different, he attended her agency's next open call with no portfolio and zero knowledge of the industry. The agency signed him, and in August he moved to New York, where he does catering or computer work when he's not modeling in Milan or Paris.

The magnitude of this change crystallized in his mind last year as he was drinking champagne on a balcony overlooking the Champs-Elysees. The guy who always thought he'd be an engineer was doing the Louis Vuitton show in Paris. He's definitely happy he took the plunge -- he gets to see people and parts of the world that would otherwise be inaccessible -- but there are frustrating parts of the life he has chosen: the tedium of casting calls, the repetition of photo shoots.

"At first I was pretty enthusiastic because I assumed I would have great success, but once the reality set in, pretty much every week I have moments where I think, 'What am I doing?' " says Foster, 27. "I'm trying to not worry about long-term career plans. I hope that by keeping my eyes open and trying new things I'll eventually carve a path for myself."

Chance and luck are ingredients in any great adventure, but sometimes the dive into the unknown, though executed with abandon, is planned with care. In the early '90s, Debra Doherty set her sights on the Baltic States. She took Russian language classes at night, then sold her house in Fairfax, quit her job as a government lawyer, threw her stuff in storage and moved to Lithuania for two years. With the horizon barren of excitement, she did a bit of planning and made her own, just as she had done years before when she moved to England.

"It was exhilarating," says Doherty, 52, who now lives in Bethesda. "I knew I wanted it. It took a lot of effort to get there. The whole idea of taking this time was to reward myself for being a member of the establishment and buckling down and saving money."

Having been back in the States for a decade, Doherty admits to hearing the sirens' call of New Zealand. She has looked into visa requirements and the cost of rental homes. Maybe she'll go to school there. She'll start over again, though it's not about barreling ahead and torching the past; it's about living many lifetimes in one.

"I'm not throwing anything away," Doherty says. "It's like that old saying: 'Wherever you go, there you are.' As much as you try to reinvent yourself, you're still dealing with you. You're building on something. I definitely see all those experiences as building blocks that form the chain of my life."

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More than 150 readers e-mailed us to share their tales of starting over. Click here to read excerpts from four readers' stories, and to share your own.