On Not Finishing Things

Taste, discipline, and the fear of being ordinary

The Worst Person In The World, 2021

If I could teach a masterclass on taste versus discipline, I'd make more money than I ever have—which is not much, because I have plenty of the former and little of the latter.

There wasn’t a specific person or moment that cemented my belief in my good taste—that was all me. I wanted to be someone with good taste: well-read, well-spoken, the kind of person who can sit through eight hours of Angels in America and actually enjoy it, who wears The Row and can tell a Sargent painting from a Cassatt. I’ve built much of my identity on refined taste, in part because I genuinely appreciate beautiful things, but also to hide what I’m ashamed of: my habit of starting things and not finishing them.

In The Worst Person in the World—a favorite of mine—Julie is asked what she does. She hesitates, then lists all the things she’s tried: medicine, photography, writing. Each one abandoned before it could define her. The film captures something I recognize too well—the fear that choosing one path means closing off all the others, that committing fully to something ordinary means accepting you’ll never be extraordinary. So you keep the options open. You keep starting over. And you end up, at 30-something, with nothing finished.

Some people are problem solvers. They thrive when running toward challenges rather than away from them. Everybody wants those people on their teams, building things, fixing things. No one has explicitly told me they wouldn’t want me on their team, but I wouldn’t hire me. I’d want to run the team—the line between taste and vision is blurry enough that I could justify it—but I wouldn’t count on myself to solve the hard shit. Stamina and temperament are just polite masks for the real culprit: ego.

When you have good taste, you also have high standards. You can’t suffer mediocrity (despite having lived with my own for 35 years), and you equate making with making something great. Some people write for the pleasure of writing. I write because I hope I’ll be Joan fucking Didion. The irony? This desire has prevented me from writing as much as I should have if I wanted to be even 25% as good as Joan Didion. Because that woman put pen to paper.

The problem with good taste is that it leads to self-indulgence and, worse, complacency. You can get away with more if you appear—and to some extent are—smarter than average. You get things quickly. You’re full of ideas, some yours, some borrowed from the greats you keep reading. You express yourself with the ease of someone whose lived experience translates naturally into captivating narrative. This isn’t how you build an impostor—those are the ones who ask ChatGPT to summarize a Paul Auster novel instead of reading it—but it is how you build a person whose compass points only toward signals from others.

“The others”—the ones who deem Joan Didion great—and the external validation that feeds this demon: these are things I haven’t been able to break with. Is it because I secretly hate myself? Too strong a sentiment for someone with at least one redeeming quality: good taste. But as I grow older, I grow more ashamed of my lack of discipline. Thinking about having a child makes me face something ugly: appearing impressive to others will never fill the void of feeling utterly unimpressive when the audience is gone.

When I applied to film school and got rejected, I felt betrayed. I’d been so certain I would get in—it would be the mecca for a person of good taste. I didn’t keep trying to make films. I told myself I would have hated school anyway (probably true) and that I couldn’t make it in the industry without the right connections (also probably true). But there’s still a folder on my computer with scripts and storyboards that, while far from Sofia Coppola masterpieces, I loved working on. One story in particular—based on growing up in ballet school—still feels like the truest thing I’ve ever written. It has never seen the light of day because I was waiting for “the others” to tell me it was great.

When I decided to shut down my company after three years of hard work—after building a real product with real customers—I told myself we didn’t have product-market fit (partly true), that investors didn’t want to give us money (true), and that I’d run out of funds to keep building (true). It was easier to give up than to sit with the pain of not knowing how to turn things around. Not knowing how to come up with a better idea, to pivot, to be the kind of person who can actually run a real business. And worst of all: the unspoken fear of “the others” saying, “Ah, that girl Sabina who started and failed at yet another thing.”

The pattern repeats because the fear underneath never changes: better to exit before the verdict comes in.

I’ve given up on things when they got hard. I haven’t started things because I was terrified of doing them and discovering I wasn’t that smart or special. That thought continues to be a black hole, ready to eat me alive. Could I live with my once-and-for-all proven mediocrity? Could I tolerate this person if I allowed her to demonstrate her full potential for failure or nothingness? I don’t have an answer. No amount of “radical” self-love or self-acceptance could make it less painful. But maybe I could dislike her a little less if she gave it her all.

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