In Praise of the Half-Finished: A Museum of Things I Never Completed
I have a folder on my laptop called "Writing" and inside it, a graveyard. There's the novel from 2021 (chapter three, 11,000 words, a woman inherits a laundromat — don't ask). There's the essay about my grandmother that ends mid-sentence because I started crying. There's a podcast outline. A screenplay. A newsletter about municipal politics that I have no memory of starting.
For years I treated these like failures. Little receipts of my flakiness, sitting in a folder, judging me every time I opened my laptop. Then one night I actually read through them, and I realized I'd been telling myself the wrong story entirely.
The Museum Nobody Curates
Walk through my abandoned projects with me:
The Novel (2021). Eleven thousand words of genuinely decent prose about a woman inheriting her aunt's laundromat in Buffalo. Did I finish it? No. Did it teach me I can sustain a character's voice for 40 pages? Yeah. That's not nothing.
The Scarf (2022). Forty percent knit, currently a rectangular object of no known purpose living in a basket. But I learned to knit during a rough winter, and for three months, my hands had something to do besides scroll. The scarf did its job. It just doesn't know it.
Guitar Lessons (2019). Four chords. I can play "Horse With No Horse" — sorry, "Horse With No Name" — badly and with tremendous feeling. My partner has heard it approximately 300 times. No regrets.
The Sourdough Era (2020). Do I need to explain the year? The starter died in August. We had a service.
Half a Quilt (2023). See: scarf, but with more fabric-store spending.
Finishing Is Overrated Anyway
Here's what productivity culture refuses to admit: the finish line is not where the value lives. We've absorbed this corporate brainworm where everything must ship, scale, and be monetized — where a hobby that doesn't become a side hustle is somehow a waste. It's the same logic that turned everyone's kitchen into content and everyone's vacation into a reel.
But curiosity doesn't work on a roadmap. You get obsessed with watercolors for six weeks because something in you wanted to know what mixing burnt sienna feels like. Then the question is answered, and you move on. That's not quitting. That's learning, which used to be the whole point.
Think about it: nobody calls a conversation a failure because it ended. Nobody says the beach vacation failed because you didn't move there. Why do we treat interests like contracts?
Some Things Are Just For Visiting
There's a difference between a life's work and a place you visit. The novel was a place I visited. I stayed eleven thousand words' worth of time, and I left with something — better sentences, a softer understanding of my aunt, proof that I could sit with a hard thing for months.
The people who finish everything are not morally superior to those of us who sample broadly. They're just built differently. Some of us are sprinters of the soul. We fall in love fast, learn fast, and wander off to the next fascination trailing yarn and half-chords behind us.
So here's my proposal: start an Unfinished Projects Club. Membership requirements: at least one abandoned thing you're no longer ashamed of. Dues: zero. Meetings: optional, obviously, we're not monsters. The agenda is simple — you show your half-made thing and instead of explaining why you quit, you say what it gave you.
I'll go first. The laundromat novel gave me back writing after years of only writing for work. The scarf got me through February. The guitar gets my partner through every bad day, whether she likes it or not.
None of it's finished. All of it counted. Back off, productivity culture — the museum is open, and admission is free.
