There is a guitar leaning against the wall. There is dust on the tuning pegs and one string has gone slack.
Next to it, a box with the materials from a course that lasted three weeks. Running shoes, almost new. A language you were going to pick up again in September, and that you were also going to pick up again the September before. A notebook with twelve pages written and a hundred and twenty blank.
The list is different in every house, but almost everyone has one.
And the first thing worth saying is that the list has nothing to do with laziness. Everything on it started well. Very well, in fact.
“I get restless, I get bored fast”
There is a sentence I hear a lot in session: “I like too many things.” And it almost always comes with two others: “I get restless” and “I get bored fast”.
People say it with an odd mix of pride and irritation. Like someone describing a flaw they secretly find charming, until they add up how many years they have been adding this up.
Because restlessness feels good from the inside. What does not feel good is looking back at a field full of half-built things and not being able to say what you are actually good at.
It is not a discipline problem
The explanation you give yourself is usually that one: that you lack persistence, that you are disorganised, that if only you had more willpower. It is a comfortable explanation because it is a moral one, and moral explanations have the advantage that you can repeat them forever without anything changing.
But I do not think that is where this lives.
Once, talking with someone in session, a phrase slipped out of me in English: fantasy always wins.
What happens to me, and what was happening to that person, and what is probably happening to you, is that the world you build in your head is always more appealing than the one you are living in. Always. It is not a fair fight.
Because the imagined version has no friction. The imagined guitar sounds good. The real guitar, on a Tuesday at half past seven, with your fingers aching and one chord that will not come out, does not. The imagined move abroad is light and new streets; the real move is an internet company that will not pick up the phone.
What is new wins because it has not charged you anything yet.
And everything outside pushes the same way
This does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a time that sells, in very large doses, exactly what your head already manufactures for free: adventure, travel, change, starting over, “reinventing yourself”.
What almost never shows up on a screen is the third week of something. The boring part. Day two hundred of any practice, identical to day one hundred and ninety-nine, which is precisely where something starts to exist.
Being steady and repetitive does not photograph well. It has no image. And so it becomes hard to want, even for the person already doing it.
Committing means paying a price
Here, I think, is the bottom of it.
Choosing one thing means giving up being all the other people you could have been. Really sitting down with the guitar means accepting that you will not be the one who plays piano, throws pottery and runs marathons. It is a loss, even if it sounds out of proportion to call it that.
And as long as you do not choose, you lose nothing. The twelve possible lives stay open, all equally bright, all equally unstarted.
That is why the moment boredom arrives matters so much. Boredom does not usually turn up when something becomes bad. It turns up when something stops being new, which is exactly the moment it would start asking something of you.
How many of the things you dropped did you drop because they were not yours, and how many because they stopped being new? You cannot always tell. I am not entirely sure about my own list either.
And perhaps not all of them deserved finishing. Some things are abandoned for good reason.
What you can do with this
There is no method. There are a few things that help you see it better:
- Before starting something new, write down what you are going to stop doing to make room for it. If there is nothing to drop, there is no room: there is fantasy.
- When boredom arrives, give it a date instead of arguing with it. “Two more weeks and I decide.” Boredom always arrives in a hurry; the decision does not have to.
- Make two lists: what you dropped and do not miss, and what you dropped and still weighs on you. The second one is much shorter. It is the only one that matters.
- Finish one small thing, and finish it badly. An ugly painting, a song full of mistakes, five slow kilometres. Finishing one thing badly teaches you more than starting ten things well.
- Look at what happened on the exact day you dropped it. Not the week: the day. There is almost always a specific scene there. A class where you understood nothing. Someone who made a comment. A Monday when you caught sight of yourself doing it and did not like what you saw.
That last point is the one that surprises people most. What gets abandoned is rarely abandoned out of accumulated tiredness. As a rule it gets abandoned on a specific day, in a specific minute, right after something that made you feel odd in front of someone else, even if that someone else was you.
When this stops sorting itself out
There is a point where leaving things half-done stops being a trait and starts costing you: when it happens with people too, with work, with the places you live. When what repeats is no longer “I did not finish a course” but “I never stay long enough for anything to become mine”.
At that point, looking only at the behaviour is not enough, because the behaviour is the visible part of something that was put together much earlier and was almost never chosen.
That is what we work with in Gestalt therapy: not the lack of persistence, but what sits underneath it. What you are protecting when you leave in time. What you are keeping yourself safe from by staying slightly outside. What happens in your body on the day something starts asking you to stay.
Understanding this does not change it. But looking at it slowly, with someone in front of you, tends to change the place you choose from next time.
The guitar is still against the wall.
Maybe you sell it. Maybe on some Thursday you pick it up, change the slack string and play badly for fifteen minutes. Both are fine, and neither is the point.
The point is that inside your head there is a version of you who already plays it perfectly, who never makes mistakes and never gets bored. That version will always win. It is unbeatable, because it does not exist.
The only thing that can compete with it is fifteen real minutes, on a Thursday, sounding fairly bad.
If any of this rang true, you might also want to read I struggle to commit in a relationship, where the same thing shows up with people instead of projects.
I work in person in Barcelona and also online, in Spanish and English. My diary is open: if you would like to ask about availability, write to me.