Not every day is going to be perfect. You won’t wake up every morning and love your life. Some days there will be clouds. Others will have sun, blinding you at the ungodly hour of 7am. Some mornings you’ll roll over, hungover and groggy and miserable. Others you’ll feel refreshed and alive and ready. And sometimes you won’t know how to feel at all.

But the beautiful thing about every morning is that it’s a new day, a new chance, a new beginning.

And when you open your eyes, when you feel your body slowly slip out of a dream and back into reality, when the tingling sensation in your fingers and toes fades and you open your eyes and blink—that is a gift and an opportunity.

And you have, in that moment, the choice to let your yesterday define your today, or to start again.

See, what happened in the last twenty-four hours is done. Sure, it could have made you feel heavy, made you drag around your bones like dead weight, made you want to give up, to fall asleep and never wake again, or to just cry until your whole body felt empty.

But yesterday is gone. It no longer has power over you, unless you let it. Those moments don’t have to hold you back anymore. You don’t have to let the past pave the way for your future, or change how you feel about what’s happening right now.

Today is a perfect day to start again.

I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in our pain. We’re human and we feel. We feel everything so deeply. And sometimes we struggle to let that emotion go, or to come to terms with it. Sometimes we get caught in conflicts with people around us; we make ourselves dizzy trying to understand things that take time to be processed, or we try to repair relationships that need energy and attention and patience to be completely fixed.

We try to rush our healing, and it ends up making us feel worse. We allow what happens to us take a toll on our hearts. And this isn’t a bad thing, it’s a human thing. But sometimes we have to separate the bad from the direction we’re heading. Sometimes we have to feel the pain, but then let it go, let it dissipate and slide off our bodies like rain.

Sometimes we have to fall asleep, worried and lonely and exhausted and broken, but then wake up with a new perspective.

We have to choose to begin again.

And sometimes I think that’s the most important thing to remember when you’re feeling down, when you’ve lost your way, when you’re reeling from someone’s betrayal or death or a pain you never imagined would hurt so bad.

You have to choose to restart. Choose to shake off yesterday and make room for today. You have to see today as an opportunity, not a continuation of what was.

You have to remind yourself that a new day lies before you, untouched and unhindered. And you have to find it within yourself to take a breath, to put one foot in front of the other, to step forward, to let what happens happen, to trust that today is new.

You have to know that you’re on this journey and sometimes it’s going to suck, but you’re fighting through. You have to remind yourself that what was is not what is. And you have to believe in the power of today—twenty-four hours of new.

Marisa Donnelly is a poet and author of the book, Somewhere on a Highway, available here.