The graveyard of projects
Sometimes I catch the pull early enough not to follow it. I see the thing glinting. The new hobby, the course, the instrument, the language. And I deliberately look away. And then I sit there having done the reasonable thing, feeling completely hollow.
That’s the part that doesn’t make the posts. The posts are about the chaos: too many interests, bought the thing, never used it, on to the next. Which is also true. But underneath the chaos is something quieter and worse: the grief of choosing nothing.
My brain generates urgency constantly. Right now it’s telling me I should be learning Portuguese, that I’ve wasted the watercolor kit still in its packaging, and that if I just started strength training properly — not halfheartedly, but properly — everything would be different. It says all of this simultaneously, and with equal conviction, and it says it every single day.
The ADHD side of this is obvious. Novelty, urgency, dopamine hunt. But the autism side is what makes it worse. Because the autism side knows: if you start something, you have to start it right. You have to learn it properly. You have to matter at it. You can’t dabble in Portuguese for six weeks and then abandon it. That’s not how it works. So you either go in fully or you don’t go in at all.
And you don’t go in at all.
People call this ADHD paralysis. I’d call it something different. You’re standing at a fork with forty paths, knowing that picking any one of them means walking away from the other thirty-nine.
My GitHub is a graveyard. Hundreds of repos. Some lasted a weekend, some lasted months. CLI tools, web apps, automations, browser extensions. Most of them have beautiful specifications, implemented about 80%. Many have working code nobody will ever use. And many of them kept me up at night. I could see the whole thing, how great it would be, how it would work, how it would feel to use it. Then burnout hit, or a new idea showed up, or both. They’re still sitting in specs, radiating low-grade guilt.
I used to feel shame about this. Now I feel something flatter. These are just objects. They’re what it looks like when your brain produces more wanting than you have time or energy for.
What I’m still working out is when to follow the pull and when to let it pass. There’s no clean rule. Sometimes I follow it and something sticks — turns into a real interest, stays for years. Sometimes I follow it and it costs me three weeks of evenings and another dead repo. Most of the time I can’t tell which it will be until I’m already in it.
The rational solution is to wait it out. Let the sparkle dim a bit. See if the interest is still there in a week. Half the time it isn’t.
That should be a relief.
It doesn’t feel like a relief. It feels like another small loss. Which is a problem I don’t have a solution to yet.