On Completion

by Kylee Walton

To start, this will be the final post for this blog. I find myself struggling to grapple with this because I’ve really enjoyed writing these posts, exploring ideas that I never found time to deeply analyze, and sharing those ideas with others. This has been really fun for me and I want to start this final blog post with: thank you very much for reading!

I want to discuss the concept of completion. To complete things. I recently purchased a pocket dictionary to carry with me whenever I find a word that I need to define, in place of googling everything on my phone. My Merriam-Webster’s pocket dictionary defines completion as this: 1. Having all parts 2. Finished 3. Total. I feel as though, fundamentally, I have never been a completionist, at least one in relation to the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition. I can’t count the amount of things I never finished, books, tv shows, movies, games, hobbies, creative projects, so many things that I let go of in favor of something else (that I usually end up dropping as well). I think my aversion for completion stems from both my fear of imperfection and lack of grip on things that I value for myself. Along with this, I feel as though it comes from aesthetic distraction. 

I’ll explain further, starting with aesthetic distraction. I’ve written about this before, but I’m easily distracted by public perception of my own aesthetics. I’ve picked up books simply because they have an aesthetically pleasing cover, one that I’ve seen roaming around on the internet that all the people I admire aesthetically have read and posted photos of. Because of this aesthetic distraction, I’m not as personally invested in the book, which leads me to easily disregard it without much guilt in favor of something else. This is how I fail to complete things that I carry with me, that other people can perceive, like books and even certain hobbies.

With media like films and tv shows, I feel similarly. However, I feel as though I don’t value the idea of commitment when it comes to the media. Yet, I also see my lack of commitment in other aspects of my life, like club work and assignments. I don’t feel a sense of commitment, which causes me to ignore the things I’m working on. However, commitment (or being able to commit) is a valuable trait that I wish to have for myself. It makes me feel more stable to be committed to something, but I fear the imperfection that comes along with committing to something, whether that be aesthetic imperfection or internal imperfection (feeling imperfect about something I directly created/chose). I’m unsure exactly how to push myself to commit more, but I think I have to wade through those feelings of boredom and imperfection in order to commit. I think that just sticking to anything, even if I don’t necessarily love it, will push myself out of this box.

I find myself being able to do that with journaling. I usually get sick of a journal after a few days, but lately I’ve been sticking it out on my last few journals and have been actually completing them. When completing something, there’s always that sense of accomplishment, but there’s also that excited feeling of a new start, a new beginning of something. Whether that be starting a new journal, starting a new book, taking on a new creative project, that feeling of a new start can be equally as motivating as the feeling of completion.