The Year of Unfinished Things

Consider all that lies waiting

My doll, pattern by Ann Wood

In June 2020, I bought a doll kit. I had a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old, and we were just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We were spending 100% of our time at home, with the exception of my husband who left only once a month to buy as many groceries as he could. My baby had officially been in isolation for most of his life.

I saw other people making the doll online and it was so adorable that I decided this was just the thing to do during these heartsick times. I messaged a best friend who also had two small children and suggested that we could buy these kits and sit on either end of my porch and make them, together. Maybe it could even become a regular thing—making little dolls that our children would tuck into their fists and treat as friends in lieu of their real human friends.

When the time came, we sat on the porch, unpacked the kits, and proceeded to make no progress at all. Life at that moment was too strange and too overwhelming to allow us to do much of anything but hungrily, greedily, talk to each other. The fabric sat in our laps, the needles pinched, unthreaded, between our fingers. After she left, I went into the house and made two legs before tucking the bits of fabric back into the box and going upstairs to hold my baby. I lost track of the doll kit, as I lost track of so much during that time.

My home is full of unfinished projects. Sections of window trim left unpainted, framed pictures propped up against walls. There are sewing projects piled in a basket, books on the shelf with a bookmark halfway through them. There are stories and novels waiting in journals, starred in my computer. I have long since released myself from feeling any guilt about these projects, but they register nonetheless. What does it say about me, I wonder, that I have left so much unfinished?

Last week, when I opened my closet looking for something that was, no doubt, obscured by a pile of unfinished projects, I saw the doll kit right there, on the floor. I looked at it. I felt sad. My children, now 5 and 8, were interested in black holes and mythological beasts, the allure of a tiny doll long since gone. I shut the door and tried to forget.

But a few days later, alone in the house for 48 hours, I went back and retrieved the box. It took me many, many hours to finish her, which meant I had many, many hours to chastise myself, to quit, and to decide to keep going over and over again.

This is taking too long. This is a waste of your time. There are a hundred other, more important things you could be doing. You could be cleaning out the pantry, washing the windows, organizing your sweaters so they’ll fit in your drawers. You could be reading a book. You could be writing your novel. You could be sleeping.

But something in me rose up against every argument. The fact that there were a hundred more pressing things was exactly why I should keep on. The fact that this doll was the least important project in the world was why I couldn’t give up. I realized that these personal projects—making a doll, or sewing a quilted vest or needle punching a handbag—are so much more than the objects they’ll result in. They’re me, reaching for hope. A hope for a bit of time, a little solitude, a life with enough ease that I can do things just because I want to and not because I have to.

The project, I have always thought, will make the space necessary for me to do the things I wish to do, to be the person I wish to be. But now I see that the opposite has to be true. I have to make the space. I have to decide that I can choose what is a good use of my time and what is not.

I finished the doll, and as I did, I had the sensation of an overburdened scale, weighted too heavily in one direction, lifting ever-so-slightly, as if the smallest of weights had been removed. Right then I declared 2025 The Year of Unfinished Things. I’ve been thinking about it all the time, telling everyone I know. It’s not the year of finishing things—I know enough to know that this kind of pressure to accomplish is a recipe for disaster. But it is the year of unfinished things. The year that I take stock of all that lies waiting and decide to pay attention, to make progress, to consider that I am a person who finishes things. In my own way, in my own time.

for Kallie ❤️