Essays

by Scribes Stories · 6 min read · 2 views

The Art of Unfinished Things I have a drawer full of half finished projects, and for most of my adult life I considered this drawer a kind of quiet indictment of my own character. The half knitted scarf, abandoned somewhere around row forty when the pattern grew complicated and my patience grew thin. The novel manuscript, eighty pages deep, that I have not opened in three years but also cannot quite bring myself to delete. The language app that informed me, with what felt like personal disappointment, that I had once maintained a two hundred day streak before abandoning it entirely during a particularly difficult month. I used to believe these unfinished things represented failures of discipline, evidence of a character too easily distracted, too quick to abandon commitment the moment it stopped feeling exciting. I have since come to believe something considerably different, and I want to spend some time here making the case for it, because I suspect a great many people carry the same quiet shame about their own drawers full of unfinished things, and I think that shame is, in a great many cases, simply misplaced. Consider what actually happens when we begin something new. We are, in that initial moment, operating almost entirely on projected value, an imagined future version of the finished thing that we have not yet earned the right to actually possess. The half knitted scarf represents, at its outset, a beautifully finished garment I have not yet made. The novel manuscript represents, at page one, a complete story I have not yet properly discovered. This projected value is intoxicating precisely because it costs nothing yet. It exists purely as possibility, unencumbered by the difficult, unglamorous labor that separates possibility from actual achievement. The trouble begins somewhere in the messy middle of any genuinely difficult undertaking, the point at which the initial intoxicating possibility has worn off but the eventual satisfaction of completion remains still frustratingly distant. This middle section, whatever the specific undertaking happens to be, is almost never where our culture chooses to focus its attention. We celebrate beginnings, the bold decision to finally start. We celebrate endings, the triumphant completion, the finished product held aloft for appropriate admiration. The middle, exhausting and unglamorous and often genuinely tedious, receives almost no cultural attention at all, which leaves most of us feeling, when we inevitably encounter our own difficult middles, as though something has gone uniquely wrong in our own particular case, rather than recognizing the middle as the universal, unavoidable feature of literally every difficult undertaking that has ever existed. I think this cultural silence around the middle produces a considerable amount of unnecessary shame. When my scarf sat abandoned in its drawer, I did not experience this as the ordinary, universal experience of encountering a difficult middle section and temporarily losing momentum. I experienced it as a personal failure, evidence that I lacked whatever specific character trait successfully finishing things apparently required. This interpretation, I now believe, was almost entirely inaccurate, though it took me considerable time and considerable unnecessary shame to properly recognize its inaccuracy. Here is what I think actually happened with that scarf, and with the novel manuscript, and with the language app streak. I encountered the ordinary, universal difficulty of a project's middle section, the point where initial enthusiasm has faded and true completion remains genuinely distant. At that exact moment, something else in my life, some other opportunity or obligation or simply a more immediately interesting possibility, presented itself with a considerably lower activation cost than continuing the difficult middle work in front of me. I chose the lower cost option, as most people, most of the time, given similar circumstances, would probably also choose. This is not moral failure. This is simply the ordinary, predictable behavior of an attention driven creature responding rationally to relative costs and relative rewards. None of this means abandoned projects carry no cost at all, or that finishing things never actually matters. There is genuine value in developing the capacity to push through difficult middles, genuine satisfaction available only on the far side of completion that no amount of enjoyable beginning ever quite manages to replicate. I do not want to argue that unfinished things are simply fine, requiring no further examination or effort toward improvement. I want to argue something more specific. I want to argue that the shame typically attached to unfinished things is considerably disproportionate to what unfinished things actually represent, and that this disproportionate shame often does more damage to our future willingness to begin new things than the unfinished project itself ever actually cost us. Consider the alternative framing I have gradually adopted, considerably reducing my own shame around that drawer of half finished projects. Each abandoned undertaking taught me something genuinely valuable, even in its incompletion. The scarf taught me that I find repetitive handwork considerably more satisfying in short, frequent sessions than in the long, uninterrupted sessions I had originally attempted, information I have since successfully applied to other craft projects that I did, in fact, eventually complete. The novel manuscript taught me that I write considerably better dialogue than description, a discovery that has meaningfully improved my more recent, shorter writing projects even though the original novel itself remains unfinished. The language app taught me that gamified streak tracking works wonderfully for my motivation during easier periods of life and becomes actively counterproductive during genuinely difficult periods, when missing a single day feels like such a significant failure that abandoning the whole effort becomes easier than simply resuming imperfectly. None of these lessons required actually finishing the project to properly extract. The learning happened during the doing, not exclusively at the moment of completion, and I think our cultural obsession with finished products as the sole legitimate measure of an undertaking's value causes us to systematically undervalue everything genuinely useful that happens during the attempting, regardless of whether the attempting eventually concludes in triumphant completion or quiet, unglamorous abandonment. I am not suggesting we should stop trying to finish things, or that completion doesn't matter. I am suggesting we recalibrate how much shame we attach to the considerable portion of our efforts that don't reach completion, recognizing that shame as a largely unhelpful cultural inheritance rather than an accurate reflection of what actually occurred. The drawer of unfinished things is not a museum of failure. It is closer to a laboratory, a record of genuine attempts at genuine learning, most of which extracted real value long before any question of completion ever became relevant. I still have that drawer. I have not thrown away the half knitted scarf, though I suspect, honestly, that I never will finish it. I have stopped, though, feeling the particular flavor of shame I once felt every time I happened to open that drawer and encounter the evidence of my own supposedly failed commitment. I see, instead, a record of genuine curiosity, genuine willingness to begin difficult things despite uncertain outcomes, and I have come to believe that this willingness, considerably more than any specific project's actual completion, is the trait genuinely worth protecting and genuinely worth celebrating, in myself and in anyone else brave enough to keep filling their own drawer with beautifully, usefully unfinished things.