Spent the last three days purging my devices of digital barnacles - megabytes of half-baked WIPs, university papers and presentations, screenshots of things that I thought would be useful some day.

Funny how files calcify. You birth a project with that first white-hot, primal "yes, this matters, this is the thing, save it, double save it, buy specialized tools, let it consume you just for a bit, this is important, this will outlive me, carve it into the universe’s bones”—only to watch it fossilize into a monument to “someday", shrink into a thumbnail, a pixelated epitaph.

You ever stare at a folder named “unfinished projects”? It’s chaotic, vaguely threatening, and full of things that died without being properly born, my past self swore he’d resurrect. Rummaging in it, I found a background for a commission dating back to april 2021. I remembered trying to add characters into it for months. They always floated there, disjointed. "This isn’t our world, we will never look natural here" they seemed to say. You tweak a layer’s opacity. You mute a hue. You tell yourself, “I’ll solve this compositional dissonance later,” but later is really a myth sold by productivity apps and calendar reminders - the lie that time bows to our to-do lists and "watch later" very often turning into "watch never".

So I’m just posting it. Static. Unresolved. As is. Not quite enough to be anything. Oh well...

“Why not just continue keeping it privately?”— because archives are literal coffins. Art isn’t meant to be embalmed—it should haunt. It should itch. Let it hiss “you left me behind” in the quiet hours. Let it ache. The tragedy isn’t the unfinished thing; it’s the paralysis of cowering before your own yesterdays. Those fragments? They’re not clutter. They’re mirrors. They show you the selves you shed, the crossroads where you chose something else, the silent pact you made: “Someday I'll be a better person, more knowledgeable, more patient, more skilful”.

But regret isn’t in the leaving—it’s in the refusal to let the dead things teach you. Post it. Let the world see your abandoned altars. Scars are proof you fought, you tried.

It is terrible, but you tried.