The Shame of Abandoned Projects

Practice, patience, pleasure, and peer support are ways out of that shame. Plus an update on Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice—and Jesse Meadows interviewed me!

We’ve had a tremendous response to the course I’m co-teaching this fall called Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice—we’re now half way through the Early Bird discount period, and we’ve already reached half our capacity, with people from 14 different countries! We’re incredibly excited and honored that so many of you want to learn with us. If you’ve already signed up for the Early Bird list, you should have received a link to buy your tickets at the Early Bird discount. If you’re like me and keep meaning “to get around to it,” now’s the time! If you haven’t yet signed up for the Early Bird list, it’s not too late. Regular price tickets will remain on sale beginning in a week and continuing until the course starts in October, or until we sell out, whichever comes first.

If you’re interested in learning more about what KR and I are thinking about the practice of “neuroqueering,” my friend Jesse Meadows of the Sluggish newsletter has just published a podcast interview with us, which you can listen to on Substack, Spotify or Apple podcasts.

And now, some thoughts on shame….

---

I’ve taken up and then abandoned so many creative projects—quilting, knitting, sewing, drawing, painting, baking, gardening, blogging, vlogging. I have hundreds of thousands of words of unfinished fiction floating around in the clouds, and another novel in progress. It has been a dream of mine my whole life to publish a book, but I always quit before I get to the point of seeking out an agent or publisher. I have more ideas for entrepreneurial projects than you can shake a stick at, and many of them are really good ideas, but none of them has ever turned into an actual income stream that could support me financially.

With each new idea, each new project, I used to make big splashy announcements about my latest endeavor, and then I would feel intense shame later when anyone asked me about it. “How’s your novel coming along?” a writer friend might ask me, and I would mumble something vague and non committal rather than confessing that I never finished that novel, but am now working on a new novel. “How’s your garden growing?” an acquaintance might ask, and I would hang my head in shame and admit I just haven’t been able to keep up this summer.

I think a lot of us carry this shame with us—there are so many ideas teeming in our minds, and when we hit the inevitable slog of the messy middle of any creative project, the shiney allure of a new project can feel irresistible. At first the sheer brilliance of the new project shines bright and it’s easy to put the old ones out of sight and out of mind, but eventually as the light dims, we can’t ignore them anymore. We sit in our graveyard of abandoned projects and the shame can feel immobilizing.

A few weeks ago I hosted a Peer Support session as the culmination of the series of Divergent Design workshops I led for the Glazgow Zine Library. Our topic was this shame about our creative lives—the shame of serial abandonment, of chronically not finishing things. Initially, there was a lively conversation about the various ways we try to force ourselves into slogging through the messy middle of our creative projects—all the tricks and hacks we use to get ourselves to finish things once the bloom is off the rose.

But then one participant, who had been silent so far, turned on her camera and unmuted herself and said in a quiet, unassuming voice that she has used all those tricks to bully and shame themself too. But after a traumatic midlife breakdown, she realized the only way for her to have a creative life was to be kind to herself. To do creative work because it’s what she wants to do. To make art for its own sake, for the joy of it, not for a deadline, not for someone else, not to make money. She said this new approach was the only thing that made her creative life possible.

The tone in the Peer Support session suddenly shifted in an important way. It was like a lightbulb—a soft, warm, indirect light bulb—had come on in the room. This can often happen in Peer Support, where one person will quietly tell their truth, quite often a vulnerable truth, and the whole session shifts for everyone. The shift is almost always toward more kindness, more compassion, more permission, for ourselves and for each other.

It’s quite reasonable to want quick fixes when we are frustrated with ourselves about our creative lives. We have so much going on inside us, so many amazing ideas percolating up all the time. We notice things differently, making weird connections no one else sees. The shame of having nothing to show for all that teeming brilliance can feel unbearable. We want something tangible to put into the world that we can point to and say, see? I made that. We want to be seen and we want our work to be recognized. Whatever it is that gets in the way of that, we want it fixed, and we want it Fixed Now.

The good news is that it is possible to work through the issues that so often plague us and to have a satisfying creative life. And while I too went through a midlife breakdown that ultimately led me to a far more satisfying relationship with my creative work, I don’t think a midlife breakdown is required to get there!

The bad news, though, is that there is no silver bullet. It’s gonna take time, and patience, and community. Especially community.

But that’s not such bad news, is it? Time, patience, community. Healing from the traumas of shame is a practice, not a destination. In my experience, it’s a practice that spirals round and round, and some of that will include difficult, anxious, self-doubting times. But with growing self-awareness and self-compassion, I have found that the good stuff stretches longer and the difficult times are easier to sit with.

Here are a few thoughts that have helped me over the near decade since I began this practice of disrupting the shame of abandoned projects:

First of all, let’s normalize abandoning projects! Of course you abandon projects! When your mind is teeming with so many quirky connections, visions that pop up unbidden, it would be impossible to follow through on every one of them. Your creative projects are probably iterative, but so is your entire creative life—figuring out what you feel passionate about, where your talents lie, what your heart longs to share with the world. It’s not always obvious, especially for multi-passionate, multi-talented people. Figuring out what your gifts are and where your passion lies is necessarily going to involve starts and stops, and that’s a good thing! Creativity nurtures creativity—nothing you start and then abandon is ever wasted, it just becomes part of the energy and passion leading you toward your truest vision.

And maybe you’ll never land on one creative calling and get really good at that one thing—that’s fine too! Dabbling is so undervalued, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with loving novelty. I think the reason we feel such shame for serial hobbies is that as a culture we value mastery over pleasure. But often those driven to master (and often to monetize) a single skill or a craft lose the pleasure in it.

Instead, maybe ask yourself whether you had fun pursuing that project before you abandoned it. There is nothing wrong with pleasure for its own sake. Every project does not have to produce concrete, masterful results in order for it to have value. Your pleasure, in and of itself, is valuable.

And if there wasn't any pleasure in the project, even while you were pursuing it, and then you abandoned it? Congratulations! Of course not every moment of every creative project is going to be pleasant, but if you discover that it’s really not your thing, that’s a good thing to learn. Abandoning a project you really don't love isn't failure, it's data.

Abandoned projects can be pleasure, they can be data, but they can also be the raw materials for future projects. In Spiral Time, what goes around comes around. When we disrupt shame and have patience, you will be amazed at how many of your abandoned projects turn out to be practice rounds for new pleasures and new projects sometime in the future.

A photo of Jesse’s blossoming compost bin.

Recently in my research and writing, I’ve been digging deeper into some of the concepts I’ve been working on and sharing over the years—ideas like spiral time, divergent design, the role of shame in neurodivergent lives. As I read and think and write and continue to make connections, I’m realizing that a big part of the work is turning over the rich compost pile of decades of abandoned projects and discovering not only fertile ground, but seeds of ideas that I didn’t even know were still alive in the rich, rotting heap. Jesse Meadows says of their literal compost pile that it “takes trash and gives us back whole entire plants — I’ve found hope in a rogue tomato growing enthusiastically out the side of the bin, with thick stems so verdant they stain my fingers green.” Thanks to Jesse, compost is becoming another resonant metaphor for me as the seeds of old ideas find new life, and new hope, and in the projects I’m working on today with growing confidence and persistence as I shed more and more shame and lean on my loved ones and community for support.

It’s entirely reasonable to want to finish things, to have an artifact to hold in your hands or hang on the wall, maybe even to have a body of work to leave to the world. It’s also ok not to have that drive, and to simply enjoy your creative process for its own sake. That too is a gift in an increasingly bleak and joyless world. But either way, shame and self-loathing are never ever going to help us accomplish those goals. Practice, patience, pleasure and peer support will.