{{{
  "title": "Completing things (or not)",
  "status": "seedling",
  "planted": "1/27/2026"
}}}

I've recently been on the strongest creative kick I've had in years. I've been writing on this website, working on my apartment, and learning 3D printing, CAD, and microelectronics. There are numerous factors in my life to contribute to the "why now" of it all, but I'd like to think at least a small part of it is that I've killed my perfectionism.

I was recently showed my friend this website. We'd already been talking about a 3D printing project I had been messing with, and she commented how I'm "good at finishing things" (I assume she meant in contrast to her). As someone with ADHD and a long trail of unfinished projects from throughout the years, this was a foreign compliment to me--especially because I don't consider many of the things I'm working on currently to be finished. I think it comes down to a difference in perspective.

I recently watched [stop postponing your life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CdbolZvc1I), a video by an essayist I'm growing to love about "not waiting for the perfect moment" to start something. I've been integrating this into my life a lot recently. This website started not because I'd finally figured out what I wanted to write, nor the perfect way to create it, but because I was tired of *not having done it*. The first draft of this website had two markdown documents testing different styling features and links. I don't think I wrote on it for a week--but I'd started. I'd created something to build off of.

Though I don't think starting is the only issue at play here. There's a lot that can go wrong once you're working on a project, and a lot that has gone wrong on my past projects. A few of my past patterns that I'm trying to learn from:

- Daydreaming about parts of the project before you're ready to do them. That killer art style for the game you haven't made a character controller for? That perfect architecture for the website you haven't put down a line of code for? I find myself planning projects 8 steps in advance, without having completed the first 4. This makes the things you're doing in the moment feel flat because *they're nothing like what you're planning*. Additionally, planning at such a high level obscures the intrinsic difficulty of putting anything into practice.
- Planning for "the big release"--I used to make games imagining the moment I'd be able to release them, fully formed, to much acclaim. This is obviously a bad idea, and gets into my next point. There shouldn't be a designated "completion point" on most projects--it's an achillean race (the last 10% always takes longer than the first 90).
- Being afraid to let people see you fail. This goes into the last one--part of chasing that "complete" marker is because you're worried others will see how incomplete things are currently. In reality, seeing something incomplete just illustrates how human the author is--and that, to me, is human connection. I love seeing pages under construction on Neocities. I love finding half-formed thoughts. I love seeing someone's process.

This page tries to be antithetical to all of those issues. While I can't stop myself from daydreaming about that perfect architecture, I do nip those ideas in the bud when they start taking time from other things. I published this website as a seedling, and keep adding to it despite it not being perfect. The key to finishing things is knowing you'll never actually finish them--even if you have to leave them behind.