Someone please hold my hand and tell me it will be OK! Was off for almost a year and I feel like this will be the smartest move, it just hurts a little…
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Restarting doesn’t mean you will suddenly forget everything you’ve learnt so far and so long as you keep reading outside of wanikani you will run into words you’ve already learnt (even if they seem unfamiliar!). Also if you want to read ahead in your lessons you can. I will probably reset down when I get to a higher level also just for the sake of getting the more difficult kanji ingrained - you gonna be okkkkk 
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Just a year isn’t that bad. Resets can’t be undone, so why not reset to ~30ish for now and see how that works for you?
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Maybe start by self-quizzing from lvl 1 to see how far you can get. At least then you’ll know how much you remember, and will know what level to reset to.
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Get the WaniKani Self-Study addon and quiz yourself with lower level kanji/vocab and see how much you still remember. If you don’t remember that much then I guess you should reset, but depending on where you stand with your knowledge I’d say resetting back down to 1 is a bit radical.
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Go get lifetime before you reset
Nice wordplay 
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I’ve considered starting a thread entitled, “Should I reset or push on? and to what level?”
I’m considering doing it to help squash leeches by learning the material more thoroughly, but there is a lot of material I know pretty well at lower levels. Still there are many more things I seem to have forgotten over time - it has taken me quite a long time to reach level 53 - nearly 3 years. (It took me a year to reach level 27, so you are significantly quicker than me.) I try to keep the workload in check. The second time through should go significantly quicker, but I worry about excessive workload caused by this. I’d love to get to 60 before resetting, but I’m afraid I could probably take another year just to move 7 levels. If I reset, it will probably take longer in total go to that far, but I might be better off as a result.
One strategy I’m considering is to reset to something like level 15 and resurrect kanji level - by level and zap through them pretty quickly. I’ve done this up to level 7 already. I already had reviewed vocab up through level 11 or so via Memrise, so I don’t think I need either low level vocab or radicals again. I mentioned this in another thread where a user wrote a script to identify leeches. (I’m surprised feeding my API key in didn’t make their script explode!)
One thing to consider is that if you know a card cold, you will only see it 8 times to burned in a full reset. If you see it more than 8 times, it wasn’t as solidly learned as needed. The down-side is that feeding already learned material in in large packs will cause busy-work instead of actual learning. If you went through WK perfectly with every answer correct, it is still over 60,000 answers to give. In a year and a half it is over 120 items per day.
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Thanks everyone. I think my biggest concern about a full reset is the workload as was pointed out above (thanks - I hadn’t thought about that!) - I can probably blow through levels 1-10 or even 20 quickly, but then my reviews per day will climb up and I don’t have tons of free time (work full time, wife kids, video games (priorities here!), etc.).
The self-quiz is a great idea, I think I’ll mess with that for a few days to get a feel for where I’m at.
Thanks!
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Or you just made a typo that WK didn’t feel like accepting 
I would have quit ages ago out of frustration if not for the ignore script.
How many reviews are you currently sitting on?
One way I’ve seen some do it is to use the reorder script and start with your lowest levels and work your way up.
When you start to see that you are missing a ton of them that might be a good level to rest back to.
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I was in your exact shoes a few months ago. I had taken about a 2-3 year break from WK and Japanese, and when I tried reading things I had the constant nagging feeling of “I know I knew this kanji once upon a time, but it all looks like gibberish to me now.” I also had a queue of ~3000 reviews every time I logged in, and my accuracy was really low for most of my review sessions because there was so much I had forgotten. Everyone on the forums recommends just working through the reviews, but I had tried a few times, and it just wasn’t working for me.
I reset from 40 down to 5. You probably remember most of the characters in the first few levels, and if not, go review them manually. I’m much happier now going through the lower levels again. I can see all the improvements that they made in the lower levels (when I started on WK it was early beta and there were a total of 12 levels), and I had actually forgotten many of the readings and meanings of the lower level kanji. I have a lifetime account though, so that also affected my decision.
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You don’t really have to reset to 1, though. Have you analyzed via rfindley’s stat site? Resetting to 20 is probably making reviews manageable already.
That sounds like me… After about half a year of not really doing Wanikani I reset from 52 to 5 (mind you, I also paid for “lifetime” so I no longer feel the need to rush). Plus, I am simply too impatient to climb up a mountain of thousands of reviews.
What I noticed is that I could not remember the readings of some lower-level vocab (curse you, rendaku and exceptions) - so this time my motto is “slow and steady” - and relearning things is not bad.
Once again - resetting is okay if you don’t mind spending more time and if you have the lifetime subscription.
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I’m intentionally not using the script because I need to be punished more for typing inaccuracies. It’s the only way I’ll actually improve my typing speed by much
Oh, I thought I saw that script… Does it work well? Does it have “leech” in the title so it will be an easy search? (If not would you be so kind as to link me to the thread?) I’ve certainly got at least a dozen of those in th last month alone! Probably dozens I’ve noticed since January and I would like to squash them. Thanks!
EDIT: I found it. It’s interesting. It needs it’s own thread.
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This recent thread references a few things.
I found that. See my (new) edit above.
Ah… Ah… I see…
I was ninja’d by the asker. That’s a new one. 