The day before this article is published, the Arts Center exhibition about my creative writing capstone will come to an end. I’m going to have to take all the papers off the walls soon, pack everything away and leave the room exactly as I found it. It won’t take too long, but I know it will make me miserable. It feels like something nice is ending for good, even though that could not be further from the truth.

When promoting this installation and the graphic novel it’s about, I have always taken great pains to emphasize that it is far from finished. As I wrote for one introduction to it: “This graphic novel, like Oscar’s own journey, is still a work in progress.” It consists of two short comics, while I have ideas and plans for at least five more. It also looks unfinished because I still consider myself an amateur at visual art and my style is quite unpolished. This is hardly unusual for capstones in the arts, and for some in my Literature and Creative Writing cohort, the end of their capstone is the beginning of their travels in the world of publishing. So why did I feel such a strong need to hide behind the shield of ‘work in progress’? What makes us so reluctant to sincerely present unfinished work, to articulate incomplete thoughts in the classroom, to admit that what we are giving to the world isn’t perfect yet?

Part of it may be a trust issue — we don’t want to invest time and money into things that we aren’t sure will ever become reality and give something back to us.

In a world where companies can be valued for hundreds of millions based on promises that turn out to be empty, it’s sadly necessary in some cases to have quality control. The capstone somewhat serves this function; it is the last big assessable component of our time at university, a distillation of the skills and knowledge we gained from our majors. There is and will probably always be a need for ‘deliverables’, grades and benchmarks associated with them. The problem comes when the expectations of completion are either unrealistic or unfair. While many students here are lucky to have accommodating professors who understand our needs, many industries have embraced ‘crunch culture’, where the health of workers and even the quality of products doesn’t matter, as long as they are finished on schedule.

On a less cynical note, there is an obvious satisfaction that comes with properly finishing a long-term project, and most art that is seen and loved by many was worked on and polished for a long time. At the same time, I think that on some level, we crave anti-completionism. Having something to work on and things to cross off a list gives us purpose and possibility. I saw quite a few of my fellow seniors’ capstone works, but the one that affected me the most was Karno Desgupta’s theater performance: Afterparty. I won’t spoil the details of it, but I will say that it directly confronts the question of unfinished art and how not finishing projects (whether by choice or not) affects the mental health of those working on them. However, I took something slightly different from it because it felt like a reflection of my own fears having completed my capstone. It reminded me of fall 2021, which I mostly spent worrying so much about how little work I was doing on my graphic novel that I became too anxious to do any work on it. I did not even start properly drawing or writing anything for it until December. And still, I finished something. Afterwards, over the past couple of weeks, I have been destabilized in a similar way because, just like then, I don’t know what to do with myself. Maybe that’s one way of knowing when you’ve finished something: when you feel the same crippling anxiety, frustration and ennui as you did when staring at the first blank page.

With the capstone out of the way, there is very little standing between now and graduation. Every year, seniors spill ink in The Gazelle reflecting on lessons from their time here, which sometimes revolve around regrets of opportunities not taken. I was tempted to do the same for this piece, to talk about how I wish that I could leave here with more friends and more experiences of Abu Dhabi beyond the Saadiyat bubble, but then I realized something: I don’t truly see graduation as the end of anything. Whenever I imagine final goodbyes with professors or friends, I always imagine saying ‘see you’ or ‘talk to you later’, as if I’ll be back on campus next semester. It’s as if I find it so hard to envision the future that, to my mind, the present is never really going to end. Maybe this is just a coping mechanism, or maybe it is a genuinely useful way to act. It’s a small world, and who knows what you’ll revisit and who you’ll meet again? Perhaps nothing is ever really finished unless you decide it is.

A former professor at NYUAD said in the first lesson of my First Year Writing Seminar that he wanted us all to put forward our “half-formed thoughts”, and those words have stuck with me for the rest of my time here. While the main message is obvious — that it is okay to not have everything you want to say perfectly mapped out, especially in a classroom — it also reveals the key to talking about incomplete things. What matters isn’t that something is not done, but why it is not done. The things that weren’t finished, done, or made have the most engaging stories behind them: what difficulties were faced in making them? What purpose did they serve at the time that didn’t carry them forward to the end? What impact will they have on everything else we see from someone?

Seeing somebody be candid and reflective on their half-formed thoughts should be seen as a privilege, not a defect. We are getting a window into somebody else’s mind that a crafted and curated product could never provide us. There is a vulnerability in work that isn’t finished, so while I understand the fear of showing people half-formed ideas, I’d encourage you to try it all the same, whenever you feel it is safe and useful to you and others.

And given all this, it only feels appropriate to leave this article, and with it my time at The Gazelle, a little bit unfinis…