Someday Is a Place With Terrible Lighting: Excavating the Ideas I Buried Alive

There is a folder on my hard drive called 'Eventually.' It has survived four laptops, two cloud migrations, and one catastrophic hard-drive failure in 2019 that briefly convinced me the universe was sending a message. It contains roughly sixty documents: pitches, mood boards, voice memos transcribed badly, and at least one file titled 'FINAL_final_v3_ACTUALLY.'

For five years, I treated it the way most people treat a storage unit — with a combination of guilt and strategic avoidance. Then, this past January, between contracts, I did something I had never done: I opened it on purpose.

What follows is an honest accounting of what I found. Not a productivity system, not a framework. Just five ideas, five autopsies, and the surprising discovery that timing is less a gatekeeper than a slow-moving collaborator.

Idea One: The Interview Series That Needed a Budget I Didn't Have

In 2020, I wanted to produce a series of long-form interviews with behind-the-scenes creatives — the production designers, the line editors, the people whose names roll past in credits nobody reads.

What killed it: Money, mostly, but also fear wearing money's clothing. I told myself I couldn't do it without proper recording equipment and a video editor. I also quietly believed nobody would care about the people behind the people.

What happened instead: The concept never died; it just shrank. In 2022, I ran a stripped-down version as a written feature on this site — no equipment, no editor, just a phone call and a transcript. It became one of the most-shared pieces I've ever published. The lesson stings a little: I had treated ambition as an all-or-nothing purchase when it was available à la carte the whole time.

Idea Two: The Zine That Was Actually a Rehearsal

Back in 2019, I designed a small zine about freelance life. I built the grid, wrote three essays, even mocked up a cover. Then I let it sit.

What killed it: Perfectionism with a deadline problem. Every month, the design felt more dated, so I kept redrawing it, and redrawing a thing is a socially acceptable way of never finishing it.

What it actually was: Looking at it now, I can see the zine wasn't a product. It was a rehearsal. The three essays became the structural bones of my current About page. The grid experiments taught me the layout logic I still use for portfolio case studies. It wasn't shelved; it was absorbed. Some ideas aren't waiting to be finished. They're waiting to be used as parts.

Idea Three: The Tool I Built for an Audience of One

This one hurts to admit. In 2021, I sketched out a simple template system for tracking client revisions — a way to stop the endless 'which version are we on?' email chains.

What killed it: The belief that if it already existed somewhere, building mine was embarrassing. Also, a freelance income that depended on billable hours has a way of making unbilled projects feel like self-sabotage.

The verdict: This one stays buried, and I'm at peace with that. Not every shelved idea is a misunderstood gem. Some are correctly diagnosed. The revision-tracking problem was real, but my solution solved my workflow, not a category of workflows. Knowing the difference between 'ahead of its time' and 'only ever useful to me' might be the most valuable skill this excavation taught me.

Idea Four: The Essay That Was Too Honest for 2020

There's a 2,400-word draft about the shame of a slow year in freelancing. I wrote it in the depths of the pandemic, read it once, and closed the file like you'd close a door on a sleeping baby.

What killed it: Timing — genuinely, this time. In 2020, a piece about professional stagnation read as either tone-deaf or redundant, depending on who was reading. Everyone was stalled. Nobody needed a tour of the stall.

The resurrection: I rewrote it last fall with two additional years of perspective, and it landed differently. The shame was gone from the prose because the situation had resolved. This is the idea I'd point to when people say 'someday' ideas are dead ideas. The essay wasn't bad. The moment was wrong, and moments, unlike drafts, regenerate on their own.

Idea Five: The Collaboration That Needed a Stranger

The oldest item in the folder, dated 2018: a proposal for a collaborative project with an illustrator I admired but had never spoken to. I drafted the pitch email. I never sent it.

What killed it: The oldest killer in the book. I decided the answer to an unasked question.

The ending: I finally sent a version of that email in 2023 — to a different artist, with a different project, but recognizably the same pitch. She said yes in eleven minutes. That collaboration produced some of the best work of my career, work that would not exist if I hadn't gone digging in the folder and found my own five-year-old hesitation staring back at me.

What the Folder Was Actually For

Here is what I concluded after a month of excavation, and I offer it without a numbered list because the conclusion resists one.

The 'Eventually' folder is not a graveyard. It's a seed bank. Some seeds were never viable — idea three, resting peacefully. Some were absorbed into the soil of other projects before they could sprout — the zine. And a few were simply waiting for conditions to change: for skills to mature, for the cultural weather to shift, for me to work up the nerve to send one email.

If you have a folder like mine, I'm not going to tell you to schedule a 'review day' or turn it into a system. I'll just say this: reopen it when you have nothing urgent to do, read everything without editing anything, and ask one question of each file — is this dead, or is this early?

The difference is rarely obvious at the time of burial. It's only obvious now. Which means the ideas you're shelving today deserve the same courtesy: a future visit, an open mind, and slightly better lighting than 'someday' usually gets.