On Finishing Things

I haven’t made our wedding album yet. I tell myself it’s because of time. Sure, that’s true, but I bet if I cleared my calendar, I’d start and then realize it was finally a good time to paint the bathroom.

This is a recent compulsion I continue to ignore, urging myself to commit to the many projects I have already started and bought the supplies for. I have a feeling it’s not really about the white bathroom walls.

Or I’d decide it was finally a good time to edit the photos from our last trip to Norway. Or find the photos from Nelson, BC. Or make a book from any of those trips like I have always wanted to. Those would feel like progress, too.

Why am I afraid to finish things? I asked Google, and of course, there is a term for this: completion anxiety. It is rooted in many things, but the ones I recognize most in myself are perfectionism and overwhelm at project managment. I have definitely gotten so into the weeds on the right way to do something that I never moved past how to do it into the doing-it phase.

I really wish there was a book on our coffee table that I could open and our wedding photos would be there, off screens and in print. My grandmother’s Cadillac evening gown from the early 50s I wore the night before captured on film. Norway's version of mini tacos. The horse that Emily hated. My mom and best friends making me a bouquet with $25 flowers bought in a small convenience store. Josh keeping me grounded when I was surprisingly nervous.

I believe photos are meant to be printed. That curation is a big part of wedding photography and how it helps us return to our memories and experiences. The album is where you pull the story together, and make it something you can dive into on any given day, months, years, or decades later. And yet this doesn’t exist on our coffee table because not making it feels easier than making it.

Recently, I composted a piece of local honeycomb. It had been on my counter for at least three years; I was saving it for a special occasion. For the right use, the perfect use. This is ridiculous, it’s honeycomb. When I opened it, it had dried out, and I decided to compost it. I couldn’t stare at it anymore. It was another victim of my inability to finish things, to make choices, to risk getting it wrong, or to have it not go how I envisioned it.

This practice of always waiting and perfecting is eroding my self-trust and inciting thoughts of randomly painting my whole house wild colors as a physical manifestation of my desperate need to get out of my own way. I’m not sure how much longer I can resist. I think painting is also like tattoos; once you paint one room, you can’t stop.

While staying at my parents', I opened a random book this morning called Bring Your Life Back to Life and stumbled across this:

You learn how to do life by doing it.
You learn more slowly if you think you’re one of the people who can skip this part.

Here is my slight revision:

You learn how to do life by doing it. [Imperfectly!]

You learn more slowly if you think you’re one of the people who can skip this part.

Love,

Tori