I’ve been dancing with this idea for a looooong time. The kind of long-time where you swear you’ll publish it “next month,” but suddenly you’re looking at an almost-year-old draft wondering how many timelines you’ve lived since then.
It was meant to be a blog post for The Unseen Realm — the more spirit-facing-ecosystem corner of my work — but every time I sat down to finish it, the idea grew new limbs. Too many directions. Too many roots. And, hilariously, the topic itself kept stopping me. Because how do you write about the harm of the Completion Myth… when you’re stuck inside it?
Anyway. Here we are.
I want to name something I’ve been witnessing — in myself, in other creatives, in the low-stakes but not-actually-low-stakes conversations we have about “too many” abandoned projects.
Millennials are exceptional at the self-deprecating hobby-shame joke, but after a while the jokes stopped being jokes. I could feel the ache underneath when people talked about their WIP pile, or the project they “should” finish, or the sweater that’s been half-knit since the start of Covid. And I’m not talking about deadline-pressure stuff, like the holidays coming up and you haven’t finished everyone’s handmade gifts (though, yes, we absolutely so this, too).
I mean the pressure to finish things you started for yourself — things that no longer feel joyful, alive, or even relevant — but you drag them behind you anyway, like proof you are a “good” creative.
This is where I want to pause.
And invite you to pause with me.
Tune into your body for a second and ask:
What does it feel like to realize we can experience shame in an activity we love because of someone else’s narrative?
Is there heat? Tightness? Anger? A weird buzzing? A memory surfacing?
Whatever is there is yours to explore, if you wish.
For me, I feel my body buzz. It comes alive with a fierceness, or maybe more ferociousness. I've never had human children, so I can't compare, but maybe somewhere along the spectrum of Mama-lion-feels, protecting her cubs.
It makes me angry, and when I let that anger breathe, it opens into grief.
Grief for all the art that never got made.
The poems that were never written.
The plays never performed, even in the imagination.
The movement that never reached the body.
Not because of laziness.
Not because we “got busy.”
But because we were colonized by a belief that unfinished = unworthy.
That’s the Completion Myth.
And it’s not neutral.
It’s not random.
It’s not a personality quirk.
It’s a manufactured belief born from oppressive cultural systems — capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, colonialism — all of which demand order, legibility, standardization, closure, productivity, and proof.
Under capitalism, a half-finished painting has “no value.”
Under patriarchy, open-endedness is “messy” and therefore feminized and dismissed.
Under white supremacy, linear progress and quantifiable output are the gold standard.
Under ableism, pacing, play, and iteration are framed as failure.
Under colonialism, creativity is a resource to be extracted, not explored.
So when you feel guilty about a painting that’s not done, or a book you didn’t finish, or a hobby phase that lasted exactly six weeks and then evaporated — that shame isn’t proof of your moral failing.
It’s evidence of a system trying to keep creation predictable, marketable, controllable.
It wants tidy endings.
It wants closure.
It wants the final product.
It does not know what to do with process.
But your creativity?
Your curiosity?
Your whim?
Your half-formed experiments?
Those are threats to the machine.
Because the truth is: hobbies are supposed to be sacred spaces of play.
Of trying things.
Of following the thread until it stops feeling alive and then… letting it be.
And when that gets coated — syrup-thick — in shame?
Something precious gets lost.
Here’s where the grief enters for me personally:
I didn’t have hobbies for a long time.
I worked. And worked. And was so tired from working that hobbying felt impossible.
So when I finally reclaimed my creative life, it became something holy.
To feel it threatened again — not by exhaustion this time, but by internalized narratives — hurts in a different way.
And if you’re wondering why I’m grieving “the art that never got finished” in a post where I’m telling you that finishing isn’t the point — here’s the clarity:
Shame doesn’t just stop you from finishing things.
It stops you from starting.
It stops you from exploring.
It stops you from playing.
Eventually, it can stop you from creating altogether.
Shame is tar.
It hardens over time.
It blocks access to the original spark.
And sure, we can force ourselves for a while (trust me, I’ve done my fair share of “just push through”), but coercion is never a sustainable creative strategy. Especially when there’s no external demand — just the internalized echo of “finish what you start.”
We don’t pause long enough to ask:
Do I actually need to finish this?
If I hate a book halfway through, am I really obligated to finish it?
If a project is dead, why keep dragging its corpse?
Who benefits from me completing something that doesn’t feel alive?
Spoiler: it’s not you.
This post is just a primer, because honestly, this topic could be a whole book. But that’s not my path right now. (If it’s yours — take it. Go.)
There are whole additional layers to explore — neurodivergence, disability, being a Multipotentialite, Human Design Manifestor life (and maybe other types too, but I won’t pretend expertise there). All of these bodies and identities interact differently with the Completion Myth.
I’ll dive into all of that in the Completion Myth Series.
And before I close, the final irony:
I didn’t finish this essay sooner because I was trying to make it complete.
Trying to wrangle a living idea into tidy language.
Trying to get it “right.”
Trying to organize something inherently messy into something linear.
Which is the Completion Myth in real time.
Meta-irony. Delicious.
So I’m publishing this now not because it’s complete, but because it’s alive.
Ideas don’t need to be finished to be worthy.
Curiosity doesn’t need to be disciplined to be real.
Process doesn’t need to be justified to matter.
Hitting “publish” is my rebellion.
A tiny refusal.
A crack in the machine.
A reminder — to both of us —
that unfinished is not unworthy.
Unfinished is alive.
Unfinished is allowed.