The Emotional Lifecycle of Every Side Project (A Map)

You've been here before. You just didn't have a map. You've done this enough times to know the pattern exists. The surge of excitement. The quiet middle where everything gets hard. The weird guilt of abandoning something you cared about. The random Tuesday six months later when you open it again for no reason. Every side project follows the same emotional arc. Not the same technical arc — the emotional one. The feelings arrive in the same order, at roughly the same intervals, with the same inten