You want the boldfaced truth, right at the start?
I leave things unfinished.
It’s not a particularly original flaw. Most of us have probably abandoned something partway, or even embarrassingly soon after we began—a novel draft, a TV show, a new habit. Still, it’s one I have trouble forgiving myself.
We’re a quarter into the year, but in some ways this season feels like an opening. The trees in New York are popping with blooms; the light is steadily lengthening; I’m overcome, each weekend, with the urge to clear out my closets, bookcases, under the bed. I’m craving beginnings. I always have. Making space isn’t just shedding weight; it’s an invitation to the new. When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
It’s why starting has never been hard for me. It’s the seeing it through that’s my problem.
I learned to knit when I was ten. A teacher at my elementary school started a club. For a few months, I spent lunchtime clicking needles together to produce shaggy half-scarves. I have a vivid memory of the classroom, shady in the afternoon, the other girls chatting around me as I worked with deep purple yarn.
This kicked off about a decade’s worth of gift scarves for my family. Too many of them were presented on Christmas and birthdays still on the needles, three-quarters finished, only to then languish in a bin in my parents’ closet for months.
It’s normal for our interests to ebb and flow as our lives change. I’ve also always felt consistency isn’t about showing up at the same exact pace and energy all the time, but about continuing to show up at all, despite the annoyances and difficulties of everyday life. I think it’s rare to keep up the volume knob turned up indefinitely without caffeine or collapse. Even at my most creatively ravenous, I reach moments of saturation. I need a step back.
So I’m not bothered by long pauses. I’m bothered by how often I left, continue to leave, projects unfinished. At the first sign of something complex in a knitting pattern, an intimidating stitch or technique, I’d balk. I once started a beautiful burgundy cable scarf (cables are the lovely twists you often see in traditional Aran sweaters) one winter, but I abandoned that too. And in all my boxes and closets, I’ve never found it again.
My father, a lifelong reader and a teacher of nearly thirty years, loves learning. He’s the quintessential absent-minded professor: can’t remember where he hid my Christmas presents, but earned the affectionate nickname “Encyclopedia Dad” when we were growing up—because no matter what question we had about the world, he likely had at least half an answer.
He’s a big fan of neuroplasticity—the ability our brains have to adapt and expand, which we can improve by consciously changing up our routines, or taking on new challenges for our brains. This could be anything: doing the crossword, picking up a musical instrument, listening to a brand-new album. For my father, in the last few years, it’s been learning a language.
Earlier in the pandemic, he started Italian lessons with a remote tutor. I’ll admit that at first, I thought of it as a passing obsession brought on by lockdown, like baking sourdough. But over weeks and months, he’d catch me up on his lessons—vocabulary for cooking dinner, his tutor’s descriptions of her hometown. Soon, he was sending me short texts in Italian. A couple of years ago, he and my stepmother took their first-ever trip to Italy, where he got to test out his new brain cells in real time.
For a while—probably too long—I found myself irritated at how quickly he’d picked it all up. I’d taken Italian at university and learned fast (thank you, French), but without practice in the following years, I lost my vocabulary. Unlike my mother and me, my father doesn’t have a drop of Italian blood in his body—but does have an ear for languages, which is how he wooed my trilingual mother in the first place.
With distance, I can see that this annoyance was reflective, just a surface to a much murkier feeling I needed to sift through. My father made a not-insignificant commitment, and then stuck to it. (If I were a TikTok wellness girlie, I’d say he manifested it.) He’d done something I’d failed at, over and over.
My therapist has been asking me, for years now, for gentleness. She insists I’m too hard on myself. What would it feel like, she says, to ease up on the pressure. To give yourself grace.
Some days I know she’s right. A few loose ends haven’t ruined my life. In fact, some of them have been signs: of what I didn’t want, or what made more sense for me. In high school, I ended six years of karate classes to accommodate music rehearsals—a prescient glimpse into what I’d make a cornerstone of my life.
But on a bad day, or when I’ve abandoned something I can finally admit was important to me, I become furious with myself. Novels I never finished, disconnected scenes languishing in a document, impossible to weave back together. Email threads—some of them big opportunities—that I let drop or never answered, and I can’t explain why. It’s hard not to taste the shame of it, bitter and viscous, like burnt molasses.
I wonder: where’s the line? When does being gentle with myself become making excuses? How could I allow this thing I wanted—wanted to finish—to sink unrescued into the depths, and not even try to claw it back?
A few letters back, I said: “I regret the things I didn’t do more than the things I did.” (Is it gauche to quote yourself? Oh, well.) Let me amend a little: I regret the things I stopped trying to do. The things I gave up on.
My mother’s always had a taste for beautiful things (call it her Taurus sun), and that includes art. She loves Camille Claudel and Michelangelo, hates Impressionists like Monet. She developed early talents for watercolor and sculpture despite very little formal training. Growing up, I’d see watercolors she painted after meeting my father, process photos of her sculpting an uncanny bust of my great-grandmother (the real thing got lost over time). She loved taking us to a good museum, even though we could barely sit still. All this said, I never really saw her make art in real time, and I often wondered—not understanding how much time and effort parenting and working full time really takes—why not.
In the year after my mother retired from teaching middle and high school, she started taking watercolor classes at local libraries and museums. It’d been years since I’d heard her talk about painting, and then a switch flipped. Each time I came home to visit, she had a new sheaf of watercolors to show me. Over time, they progressed from blurry sketches to layered, nuanced snapshots of the places she loves most: a Tuscan village, a coupola in Paris, a stretch of seashore near her house.
I remember being pleasantly surprised at her progress. Not because I thought her incapable—she’s got more artistic skill in one finger than I have in all ten—but because she kept at it. Not only that; I was amazed that after all that time, decades, she could still build on something she’d thought was lost to her. Like a bottled message bobbing to the shore, the cork water-bitten, but the paper within still intact.
I genuinely don’t remember how I started knitting again. I know it wasn’t any grandiose idea about follow-through. Maybe it was after my concussion last summer, needing a screenless hobby. Maybe I was sick of the bag of yarn skeins I’d been carting from apartment to apartment. But it was easier than I expected, to begin again. People say it’s like riding a bike for a reason; muscle memory counts for a lot. On many long summer evenings last year, I found myself sinking, soothed, into the comfortable rhythm of clicking needles.
As summer dwindled, I made an adult-sized commitment: to knit a sweater. In retrospect, this level of ambition seems wildly stupid after so much time. I’d still never gotten past scarves and a couple of misshapen beanies. But I do remember not wanting to avoid my personal graveyard of the unfinished anymore. I hoped that a sweater, something solid, would have a tractor beam of its own—pulling me in, instead of discouraging me.
In late August, I knit a test run of a pattern I liked in some very scratchy acrylic yarn, unearthed in an atticky New England thrift store. I just wanted to see if I could do it. And what do you know—I did.
In the fall, I reknit the same pattern—this time, as an incentive not to chicken out, with the most expensive yarn I’d ever bought myself. The end result was fluffy, drapey, everything I loved in a sweater.
I sent pictures to friends, wore it constantly around the house. I felt like a kid showing off my latest drawing, giddy with the dopamine payoff. It was simple, but it was mine. Proof of a beginning that had found a solid closing loop.
Since that first sweater, I’ve been knitting steadily. A hat, two Christmas stockings (for my partner and my cat), and two more sweaters—one for my partner and one for myself. Right now, I’m working on my first summer project, a sleeveless boat neck top. Almost all of these forced me to learn a new technique or two, each of which was daunting and annoying, and I complained often and loudly about each one as I knitted. (Whoever invented the Italian bind-off, I’d like a word.) And—because yes, there is an “and”—however long it took, I did learn them all.
This past January, I finished my first colorwork sweater, which is exactly what it sounds like: knitting with more than one color. I complained about this sweater, too—the fundamental way I hold yarn makes colorwork particularly tricky, and the pattern I chose meant I had to knit surrounded by six balls of yarn at any given time. My fingers cramped; I had to unravel a handful of mistakes. I took breaks, went days without knitting because of travel and work.
But I never, not once, had the thought, Maybe I should just leave it. Not finishing simply never presented itself as an option. Once I’d started, I turned hungry; I wanted the satisfaction of those stripes, the soft wool blend I chose protecting my neck. I wanted to say, this is mine, the whole thing, because I kept going.
Well, I’m saying it now. Here’s the sweater.
It would be easy, after all this talk about beginnings, to give in to the urge to close this hole up neatly (something I still struggle with in knitting, ironically). To find the moral of the fable, like my two teacher parents. To tell you I now finish every single project, because knitting taught me to.
But I started this letter by telling you the truth—and well, I can’t stop that now.
There are things I know I’ll never go back to. Those novel ideas, ragged at the edges. Creative collaborations with friends I’ve lost touch with. Chances at career growth that I let flounder. There’s a dried-out lump of clay in my cabinet I should toss, a candle-making kit somewhere in my closet. The reason I left the thing behind—lack of interest, the moment passing, a missing piece—doesn’t really matter. Some carry nostalgia for me; some not at all. Some I do regret, and I have to live with that. But not all of them. Some of them have been motel stops and light buoys, temporary, vehicles and guides to something else.
There’s satisfaction in finishing something. That much I can say for sure (see: sweaters). But I’m not sure that my instinct to start things is so terrible, either. After all, it’s hard enough to get moving.
What a joy, what a privilege, what a wonder it is to be able to begin again, and again, and again.
I think I really needed this and it also helped me process my own tendency to start and stop and feel shame about it (while admiring those who kept things up). thank you for sharing this and I'm excited to read through more of your work!
paola!! such a personal, human, authentic piece you got here that I can really relate to. starting and persevering are two different beasts and ive yet to really know which is the bigger one for me. love your storytelling and am glad you persevered through writing this one :)))