Ninety percent done

The project I don't want to finish

I’m working on a project. It was supposed to take a week. That was a month ago. I’m 90% done though, so I might as well finish it. That’s what I keep telling myself. Of course, it was also “90% done” after the first week. It’s not that I’m not working on it, I’m putting in 60 hour weeks trying to get it across the finish line. There’s just always more somehow. I finish one piece and uncover a half dozen more waiting underneath.

The truth is, I don’t want to keep working on it. There’s other ideas that are clamoring for my attention, ones I’m far more excited by. But… I’m 90% done. And if I put it down now, I’ll never come back to it. The sunk cost has its claws in me. I know it’s a fallacy, I know that if a friend told me what I’m telling you, I’d tell them to drop it and I’d be right. I know all of that but it doesn’t seem to matter.

It’s not that it’s a bad idea. Far from it, the torture is knowing it’s a good idea, perhaps even a great one. I wake up sometimes with an idea on how to make it even better, even more beautiful, and I hate myself for it. Another flourish on a monument that’s crushing me beneath it. After all, how you do one thing is how you do everything, and so I refuse to sacrifice the quality of the project, no matter how much I loathe it.

I’m not a perfectionist, or at least I’ve never seen myself that way. I’ve launched projects before and I will launch this one. Eventually. I hope. When you create art, you don’t need to believe it’s good. But you do need to know that you put everything you had in it, or it’ll be embarrassing for the wrong reasons. There’s a deep shame that clings to me when launching a project where I know I could have done more. Any failure feels deserved, any success feels inherently fake.

So I’m stuck. I refuse to abandon this project I keep telling myself is right at the finish line, and I won’t reduce its hydra-like scope to actually get it across. With every completed task, I’m back at the bottom of the hill but I keep convincing myself I’m just a few steps away from the top.

All I want is to stop. But I know I won’t. And as I keep laying bricks, I can no longer tell if I’m building or being buried.