screen breaks, waterfall of floofs, and the ceiling you never meant to build

There's a specific flavor of awkward that comes with returning to a creative project you abandoned.

Not the gentle "oh, I've been away for a bit" kind. The full-on "I haven't touched this in almost twelve months. I have completely lost the thread and I’m not even sure who I am now" kind.

That's where I've been with a personal writing project lately. I set it down sometime last year when life required something else from me, and I've been circling back around to it in fits and starts – opening the file, reading what's there, closing the file, staring at the wall for a while.

The return has been… clumsy. That's probably the most honest word for it.

And yet, I've been thinking a lot lately about finishing projects. Partially because I actually did it this spring. I finished something big. Something that took about nine months from inception to hitting the most nerve-wracking “publish” button I’ve ever touched. And there is still more to come. It will be closer to twelve months by the time it's fully out in the world. Nine months of sustained work on a single project on narrowed bandwidth, holding a lot of things loosely, and just... kept going when none of it felt done.

Being someone whose brain is wired for beginnings means starting is genuinely easy for me. The on-ramp is so smooth it’s nearly invisible. Things go from “idea” to “almost” in a blink because there's novelty, energy, and possibility.

The spark I can generate. It's the middle that gets slippery.

And the end? Well, the end is a discipline I've often only reached because I relied on pressure, urgency, and adrenaline. It’s a skill I’m actively building… especially when it comes to projects that aren’t due to anyone but me, myself, and I.

For a long time I viewed this reality as a personality flaw. I start things and don't finish them. I collect projects like other people collect houseplants (enthusiastically and with occasional benign neglect.)

But somewhere along the way that framing started shifting for me, because I do a lot of thinking and experimenting around sustainable systems and how we're actually wired. And I started to ask a better question:

What would it look like to build “finishing” into the infrastructure instead of hoping motivation handles it?

Here's where it can get complicated.

One of the things I talk about a lot — in my work, in this newsletter, in how I structure my own life — is building systems and environments that are designed for how you actually work, not how you think you should work.

It is a foundational truth of how I live and what I do. And that framing has genuinely changed things for me.

But.

(You know there's always a but. lol)

Like anything good, you can take that concept too far.

You can use "designing for how you work" as a really sophisticated-sounding reason to never push past what's comfortable. To always work at a bandwidth level that feels manageable. To structure around every limitation until you've effectively built a very cozy ceiling over your own head.

I've done this. I recognize it in myself now. That recognition is always something worth naming — even when recognizing it doesn't automatically stop it.

The season of pulling back, reducing bandwidth, narrowing focus? That was necessary over the last 5 years. I don't regret it. Coming out of a long stretch of burnout means that contraction is part of the work.

But the expansion has to happen eventually. It is equally as necessary.

And I’m finding the expansion is clumsier than the contraction ever was.

Finishing the project this spring meant pushing past the point where it felt done-enough. It meant putting structure around the final stretch in a way that was a little uncomfortable (at times, more than a little). It meant not accommodating myself out of completion.

And now, returning to the backburner-ed writing project, I’m picking it back up after a year away. With no clue what it wants to be yet, definitely using some old habits to get back into the groove, and absolutely noticing when I'm doing that — that's the next experiment in the same question.

What does finishing look like when you build for it on purpose?

I don't have a tidy answer yet. I'm in the middle of the experiment.

But I do think there's something meaningful in the distinction between:

The first is adaptive. The second can become a new type of cage. The third is the layer of nuance I think gets missed the most in conversations about burnout, recovery, and capacity.

Because if you've spent years (cough decades cough) over-producing and over-giving in response to systems that were never designed for your nervous system, your body, or your brain... the contraction isn't avoidance. It's a correction. The floor you land on isn't laziness, sometimes it might just be what you actually have. I know that is true for me.

The growth edge there isn't "expand again." It's learning to tell the difference between:

That’s one of the phases of this work: figuring out which one you're in. For me, today, I'm in the third. And I'm equipped with better questions to ask about it.

Which brings me to something I wanted to share, because this newsletter is part of the experiment too.

You may have noticed I've missed a few weeks over the last month (if you're counting). I definitely noticed. And I've been sitting with the why as it’s happened: not a single dramatic reason, just the same pattern I've been writing about. I built a weekly cadence because I thought I should and because I wanted to prove something (to myself, mostly). That I could publish every week. And for the first year of publishing, I achieved that goal. But over the last 12 months, I only kept it when it was working. Letting it quietly collapse a few times when I hit the friction of it no longer working, instead of redesigning it on purpose.

So: I'm redesigning the cadence on purpose. A Cozy Ruckus is moving to biweekly — every other Sunday — through at least the end of September. Not because I'm stepping back, but because I'm being honest about what "building for how I actually work" looks like in practice in this season. The off weeks are earmarked for new things coming in the fall as an intentional trade because this is recalibration vs. retreat.

Consistency at a sustainable cadence beats gaps wrapped in guilt, every time. And I'd rather you know when to expect me than wonder if I've gone quiet again.

So with that, talk soon! (And don’t forget to include more awe walks this summer 🫶)