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The Invisible Finish Line – Pt. 1

“Your opponent started yesterday.” –Pastor S. Norful

When I was younger, I wanted to be so many different things. I told my parents I wanted to be an actress like Brandy on Moesha, so they put me in an acting class at the local community center. I can still remember twirling around in a white Goodwill dress, magic wand in hand, as I played the fairy godmother in an adaptation of Cinderella. After seeing the video my mother recorded of my performance, I took an exit from my acting career stage left. Then I told my parents I wanted to be a fashion designer. They got me a sheet of the ugliest purple cloth, a little sewing machine and an old mannequin from Walmart. I quit before I could even make a shirt comparable to Denise Huxtable’s Gordon Gartrell blouse. I went from detective to massage therapist, and still kept going until I narrowed it down to being a writer. But it took a lot of trials, and even more errors.

It wasn’t until I really began to write that I realized something about myself that’s been the case all my life: I don’t finish things. I start things and as soon as it begins to get a little difficult, or requires more work than I expected, I move on to something else. Sometimes I lack focus and want to do things just because they are temporarily appealing, usually because someone else is having success doing it. The problem with this is that because I keep jumping from one thing to the next without actually mastering it, it never gets it finished. In the end, all I’m left with is a trail of too many “almost-done” projects. I know I’m not the only one that does this.

Some people tend to move from project to project, even in the same subject area but still different works. I did this myself for almost two years – starting a script and leaving it unfinished to start another script or another book outline or anything but what I was working on. I call people like me “drifters.” It’s so easy to rationalize our actions in our minds by saying things like “I just got an even better idea, I’ll come back to this later,” or “doing this will help me later on when I come back to that.” However, in actuality, we’re forming a habit of “almost-quitting.” Instead of completely doing away with the piece of work, we shelve it for who knows how long. This is even worse than actually quitting because we delude ourselves with the thought that we’ll come back to it instead of fully committing to getting it done or being done with it altogether. Drifters may never see the finish line because we are too busy going from one starting marker to the next. It’s a hard life out here for us drifters.

Join me next week for part 2 of this, as I talk about “pseudos”—the counterparts of “drifters.”

Interested in writing for our Guest Blogger series? Email ktoney@perkconsulting.net
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Adrian Hunter is a love and dating writer for Elite DC Mag. The Chicago native is currently an English major at Howard University. Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue journalism and creative writing full time. Send her tips and love stories through Twitter, @aymichele_.