I'm not lazy, I'm scared.

Notes on starting and stopping

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” - a collage work in progress.

There’s a collage sitting on my desk that I’ve been “working on” for months.

Most of the pieces are already cut out. The paper has that soft, handled feel from being picked up and put down too many times. I can see what it wants to be. I know, in that quiet way you sometimes just know, that it’s close.

I’ve shown it to a few friends. They lean in. They smile. They tell me it’s good. Almost there.

And still, I can’t finish it.

I tell myself it needs more. One better image. One sharper fragment. The perfect background to make everything click. I shuffle papers. I rearrange. I hunt. I do everything except the one thing that would change its state.

I don’t glue it down.

Once I glue it, it becomes real. Once it’s real, it can be wrong.

I catch myself waiting for someone else to enter the room. An older version of me. A more legitimate artist. Someone who will stand behind my chair and tell me I’m allowed to commit.

No one comes.

So the collage stays where it is, half-finished, quietly watching me work around it.

For most of my life, I would have called this laziness. That word followed me early and stuck. Lazy felt simple. It felt like a verdict I could deliver quickly and move past.

See, I’d think. There it is again. Not finishing. Not following through.

As I’ve gotten older, that explanation has started to feel thin.

What I’ve been calling laziness has more weight than that. It feels closer to fear. Fear of being seen. Fear of caring this much and finding out it doesn’t land.

I grew up doing things on my own. Somewhere along the way, I learned to keep my ambitions quiet. Wanting to be seen felt risky. Asking for recognition felt worse. It was easier to stall than to ask directly for attention or permission.

I want to be known as a good artist. I want to believe I made some small difference. Those aren’t casual wishes. They sit heavy. They stay with me when the room goes quiet.

When I look closely, what I’ve labeled as laziness usually has the same shape. I don’t begin. Or I hover so long at the edge that beginning feels impossible.

The collage stays imagined. The photobook stays half-formed. The work I don’t yet know how to name stays safely theoretical.

I research. I plan. I talk about what I’ll do later. The future tense does a lot of work for me.

Fear hides well there.

Sometimes the fear is about failure. Sometimes it’s about scale. Sometimes it’s about doing the work alone and having no one there to witness it. I notice how often I tell myself I just need the right collaborator before I can start.

Wanting company isn’t the problem. Making things with other people is part of how I survive.

But waiting for someone else to go first has been a way of avoiding the moment where I have to stand by my own judgment.

If I strip away the jokes and the self-accusations, what’s left isn’t indifference. It’s attachment. I care enough to hesitate.

Calling that laziness keeps things clean. Fear doesn’t.

Fear asks questions I don’t always want to answer. What happens if I try, and this is it? What happens if I commit and the work doesn’t hold?

Lately, when I notice myself stalled, I try to stay with the question instead of the verdict. I look at the collage. I notice the glue stick. I notice my hand hovering.

Nothing dramatic happens.

The collage is still unfinished as I write this. The desk is the same. The paper hasn’t moved. I haven’t turned into a different kind of person who charges ahead without doubt.

But the story I tell myself has shifted slightly.

I’m not lazy. I’m standing at the moment where things become fixed.

Gluing something down means living with it. Being seen as it is. Letting the work exist without the protection of potential.

The collage stays where it is. The glue stick is still uncapped, but I think I’m ready to start putting the pieces in place.

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