On growing up in incomplete spaces, and learning how to live in them.

I grew up in a house that was never finished.

Not metaphorically.

Physically.

Walls built but not painted.

Rooms that existed, but never fully became what they were meant to be.

Spaces that held intention—but not completion.

And still, the house was full.

We had a fridge.

A stove.

A bathtub installed before the room around it was done.

I remember that bathtub.

It was in the right place. Installed. Working—technically.

Cold water ran.

But if we wanted a proper bath, we had to boil water first.

Carry it in buckets. Pour it ourselves.

The room around it was unfinished.

Dust everywhere.

No tiles. No curtains. Walls not painted.

We had to clean the bathtub before we used it.

But we could use it.

And somehow, that felt like progress.

Like we were closer to living in a finished house—

even though nothing around it was done.

It felt like a reward.

There was a toilet in another room too.

The only one that worked.

If we didn’t want to use a bucket, we used that one.

Different rooms for different functions.

Nothing fully complete.

But just enough working parts to get by.

As a child, it was normal.

The unfinished and the functional existed at the same time.

And I didn’t question it.

I only realised later that things weren’t supposed to be like that.

My mom would decide—randomly, almost urgently

that something needed to be done.

Not always the next logical thing.

Not always something that moved the house closer to being finished.

Just… something.

She would start.

Sometimes start multiple things at once.

And then stop.

Days would pass.

Weeks.

Sometimes longer.

The house would stay exactly as it was.

But she had a vision.

She spoke about it often.

Which room would be whose.

How the house would look when it was done.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to finish it.

We were always, in some way, moving toward completion.

We just never got there.

I think about that house now, as I try to understand my ADHD.

Because before I had language for it,

I had already seen it.

I don’t know if my mom would call it ADHD.

But I recognise the rhythm.

The way something begins with clarity and energy.

The way it expands into different directions.

The way it pauses—not because it’s done, but because something inside it stops holding.

I see it in myself.

In the way I can look at a mess and know exactly what needs to be done.

And then, at 11 p.m., I’ll start.

Folding.

Picking things up.

Trying to bring order back.

Until it becomes too much.

The momentum breaks.

And I stop.

The mess builds again.

Just like the house.

It’s not that I don’t know.

It’s not that I don’t care.

It’s that something in the process doesn’t carry all the way through.

ADHD, for me, feels like that bathtub.

Installed.

Functional.

But not fully supported by the system around it.

It works—but only with extra effort.

Only when I compensate.

Only when I bring what’s missing myself.

And for a long time, I thought that meant something about me.

That I was lazy.

Undisciplined.

That I just needed to try harder.

But now I understand it differently.

The house wasn’t unfinished because no one cared enough to complete it.

It was unfinished because the way it was being built

couldn’t sustain itself to the end.

And I’m still learning how to live in it.

Not as something that’s broken,

but as something that was built differently.

Sometimes I think about my mom.

And I wonder—

if she had known.

If she had understood that it wasn’t about discipline or effort…

but about how her mind worked.

Would she have approached the house differently?

And now I ask that of myself.

If I understand my mind differently…

do I live in these rooms differently too?

Maybe the question isn’t whether the house gets finished.

Maybe it’s whether we learn how to build inside it

in a way that actually holds.

Because even now—

a part of me still believes in the finished version.

The one where everything works the way it’s supposed to.

Where the water runs hot without effort.

Where the room around the bathtub is complete.

But I also remember what it took to use it.

The boiling.

The carrying.

The cleaning.

So I still come back to the same question:

Does she ever finish building that house?

And if she does…

do I become finished too?

Writer’s Note

I used to think unfinished meant something was missing.

Now I’m starting to wonder if it just means something works differently—

and asks more of you to make it work at all.