This year, Rosh Hashanah has conveniently coincided almost exactly with the start of my academic year at university. Because I was unable to go home for the holidays, I spent the Jewish New Year with my (exclusively non-Jewish) housemates, which resulted in a number of refreshing comments, one of which being: “you’re so lucky; you get double the amount of chances at a new year and a fresh start”. While this may seem a glaringly obvious statement, it stuck out to me; I never saw it like this until it was presented to me in this way.

Last year, I was overwhelmingly excited to start university at a place in which I didn’t know a single person; a chance to completely reinvent myself. Little did I know, this is actually not as realistic as it may seem, and reinventing yourself is not something that happens just in one go. I don’t think I do too badly at being a human, but I can always study a little harder, wake up a little earlier, eat a little healthier, be a better daughter or friend, and everyone can do with an extra push to kick their tushy into self-improvement mode. Luckily for me, I get not one, but two of these kicks every year; and being as lazy as I am, I need all the help I can get.

For me, last year was a tumultuous one to say the least, and returning to uni this year left me slightly overwhelmed at how I was to overcome that. However, the coinciding of my academic and religious new years was a blessing. I am far from religious, but I very often take lessons from Judaism that I find applicable to my own life, and this one came at what seems like exactly the right time. To me, the Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur period is the ultimate chance everyone gets every year to come to terms with and leave behind everything they regret from the past year. Denying things, pretending they never happened, is just as unhelpful as continuously torturing yourself with your mistakes and bringing them to the present when they are probably best left in the past. Acceptance and acknowledgment of past mistakes, owning your flaws with dignity, learning from them and moving forwards on a path of continuous self-improvement and positivity seems, to me at least, probably the only way to be at peace with yourself.

This may seem an obvious lesson from this time of year for a young Jewish person who has had any experience of their religion or culture, but it is something that I feel I have taken for granted for my entire life until I came to university, encountering people whose lives have never offered them this opportunity. The secular new year rarely offers a parallel beyond the relatively superficial ‘new year new me’ Facebook statuses, followed by an evening of celebration, alcohol and probably regrets, before everything goes back to normal 24 hours later. The Jewish new year’s offering of something significantly more meaningful gave me, and will continue to give me, the chance at a real fresh start, probably at a point in the year when most people would wish for one.

Ellie Hyman is a second year student at Durham University studying English literature. She grew up in Manchester and is half Israeli.