It’s almost 1 a.m. and I’ve got three windows open. Figma on the left (where I’ve been nudging a layout around for about an hour with nothing much to show for it), VSCode in the middle (the cursor in there hasn’t actually moved in maybe twenty minutes), and Claude Code on the right (waiting on a prompt I keep opening and not typing). In a technical sense I’m working on my site. In every sense that actually counts, I’m just sitting there.
This happens to also be the site you’re reading this on, so the whole thing is a little absurd. I’m writing a post about not being able to finish my site, on the site I can’t finish. Somewhere in the repo there’s a branch called something like redesign-02 that I stopped touching the day I stopped being the kind of person who thought redesign-02 was a good idea. There’s an older one sitting under that, and an even older one under that…
What actually throws me is that I ship things constantly for other people. Their sites, their apps, their half-formed ideas in a Discord channel at 11pm. When the constraints and the deadlines and the opinions belong to someone else, I can answer to them. Hand me a brief and I’ll turn it into something real within a week. Hand me myself and I’ll end up with forty open tabs and a kind of low, background nausea.
The description above already says it, and I’m saying it again here because apparently I need to read it a few more times before it sinks in: the hardest client I have ever worked with is me. No one else’s taste to blame. No calendar pinning anything down. An infinite canvas, which sounds great in a mission statement, turns out to be really hard to live inside of.
Honestly though, the thing that actually keeps me stuck, I think, is that I keep changing.
The version of this site I would have been proud of a year ago would look wrong to me now. The version I’m pushing around at 1 a.m. tonight will probably look wrong to me next year too. I keep growing, and the goalpost keeps walking in the same direction I’m walking, so the distance between where I am and where I think I should be doesn’t really close. The frustrating part is that I’m growing faster than I can actually get anything out the door.
This bleeds into basically everything else. There’s a verse I wrote at seventeen that I still love and genuinely cannot sing anymore, because it’s a true thing said by someone I am not. There’s an app I got to MVP over a long weekend and never really touched again, because maintaining it would have meant waking up every morning and signing my name to a version of myself I’d already drifted away from. Starting something, I can do. It’s the upkeep that gets me. That quiet ongoing agreement that what I made yesterday still counts as mine today.
Maybe the mistake is the word finished. This site might be closer to the shape of a conversation I keep having with myself, rendered in public. Whichever version of me happened to render that week, stuck up on the page until the next version renders over it. I’m trying to tell myself that every redesign-02 still in the repo is a kind of molting. Proof I was here once, and then I wasn’t.
I don’t fully believe that yet, if I’m being honest. I’m writing it down in case I grow into it.
What I do know is that this post you’re reading right now is one finished thing on a site that maybe never will be. Which is, at least, a small real contradiction of the premise. The rock rolled a few feet in the other direction. I don’t know if it’ll stay there, and that’s probably not the point anyway.
You’ve probably got your own version of this. Maybe it’s a project you keep opening and closing, or a song you can’t quite finish because the person who started writing it isn’t really the person you are anymore. Maybe it’s something else I haven’t thought of. I don’t have a tidy answer for any of it, and I don’t really trust anyone who says they do. What I will say is that if you’re sitting in front of three open windows tonight not doing anything, you’re probably fine, actually. Whatever you’re trying to build is just a step or two behind the person you already are.
The rock is a lot heavier when you know it’s yours. But I don’t really want anyone else’s.