Liz Baumann

What the heck is wrong with me?!? I have over 70 unfinished blog posts! Over 10,000 words in 33 pages… I keep starting new ones, and yet somehow I haven’t bothered to publish one in over a week. Why don’t I just wrap one up, let go and put it out there? Why can’t I finish these things I start? Why do I start things I can’t finish?

I think it’s because I fancy myself as some sort of perfectionist. A perfectionist is someone who will never feel like their work is perfect, but is doomed to keep trying anyway. Sort of like an insane person is one who keeps doing something over and over again while expecting a different result. Wishful thinking whispers in my ear that maybe my propensity to start new things before I finish others means I’m creative, considerate and careful. Maybe it’s even entrepreneurial: after all, if I embraced the attitude that I have to finish everything I start then I would never start anything for fear of being stuck with something I don’t want. Hahaha.

Practically and realistically speaking, I suppose there are a whole host of other reasons for one to not finish things:

• You realize it isn’t something you want to finish once you’ve spent some time exploring it. (I guess that’s kinda like my last point.)
• Maybe you leave something undone because you worry about the repercussions involved if you were to finish it. At least one of my unconsummated blog posts is like this.
• Finishing something has a certain finality to it: it’s then done, over, completed. But maybe you see beauty in its incompleteness and aren’t ready to let go of that, so you let it linger, untouched, on the back-burner for a while, until you’re ready to pick it up again. And then there’s a rebirth to it, it seems fresh, new, you see things you didn’t see before, because you’ve changed a bit since you left it to gather dust alone there, neglected but with latent promise.
• There’s probably a natural tendency to chase after the shiny new things than those which over time have lost their luster.
• You simply like keeping a large number of options open to choose from.
• Maybe the timing is just not right. Your subconscious is probably more clued in to this than you are.

I do feel a sense of inadequacy from not finishing something, and these things still occupy my thoughts. Like those Christmas cards I didn’t write last year.

Whew, you know, I think I am finally ready to publish this one. What a sense of satisfaction I’ll have, going from over 70 uncompleted blog posts to over 70 uncompleted blog posts. I’m not real sure what underlying point I’m trying to make, but like my cousin once said, ‘I don’t need a point to have an argument’. (I love that quote, I think I was just looking for an excuse to use it.)