A Museum of Fragments

The beauty and burden of unfinished things

I start more things than I finish. That much I can admit. What I don’t usually confess is that sometimes, I use beginnings as a shield against endings. Because finishing is final. It means letting go, stepping away, inviting judgement. If I don’t finish, no one gets to weigh it, including myself. Convenient, right?

The truth is, I do finish what matters. But I also abandon what feels too close to the bone, too ambitious, too risky. My laptop is a graveyard of half-baked brilliance. My Notes app, a landfill of poignant first lines and heavily plotted outlines that never saw daylight. Entire worlds trapped in limbo, waiting for me to return.

I call it restlessness, but let’s be honest: it’s also fear, boredom, and an unhealthy addiction to the dopamine hit of beginnings. I’m a junkie for the fresh start – the crisp new notebook, the untouched Google Doc, the electric high of saying, “I’ve got an idea!”

Still, I can’t stop. Always multitasking, always juggling ten lives inside one. Script writing, prose writing, social work. And while those balls are still in the air, I’m plotting more: shooting a short film, learning Kannada, planning a two-month trip, hosting friends, launching new artwork, relearning the ukulele, returning to French lessons, starting a letter-writing service (oh wait, I already did that). The hunger never quiets; it’s insatiable.

One life feels too small for everything I want to express, to attempt, to experience. Or is it that I’m just too afraid to choose one love and kill the others? I’ll never know.

Sometimes I imagine myself as a curator of incompletions, building a museum of fragments: Rooms lined with half-drafts, shelves stacked with almosts, drawers filled with abandoned beginnings. Visitors would come and say: She almost did everything.

And yet, I can’t imagine living differently. The unfinished keeps me alive. The juggling keeps me moving. The chaos, the flaws, the half-attempts – they are not just a part of me, they are me.

So here is my confession: I’m a restless creator. It’s both a curse and a gift to live in the delicious chaos of possibility, and to be haunted by what I never finished. But perhaps that is where I truly belong – in the pulse of beginnings, in the thrill of juggling, in the belief that creation will always overflow the borders of this one life.