The Quiet Anxiety of Unfinished Things

There is something about an empty notebook that feels less like potential and more like a judgment, which brings me to my grandmother's kitchen in 1994 where she used to make this particular kind of bread with too much yeast so it would rise until the dough literally overflowed the bowl and smeared across the counter like a slow-motion disaster, and I remember thinking that if only we could control things instead of watching them expand past our boundaries but then my father walked in with that tin box he'd found at a garage sale full of old typewriter ribbons and keys scattered everywhere like piano teeth and we spent three hours reassembling the mechanism while eating cold ham sandwiches on the floor because there were no chairs left since everyone had moved to the back porch to watch the fireflies, which is funny now looking back because I never learned how to fix typewriters but my hands still remember the rhythmic clicking of a key that works and doesn't work interchangeably like they do with every decision I make about what to start versus what to finish.

i feel this so hard — i have about four half-finished projects scattered around my house and it legit stresses me out more than starting something new would. there is some weird psychological thing where an unfinished project takes up more mental space than a finished one because your brain keeps trying to resolve it.