Pride fills my chest when I think of what I am working towards.

Scaffolding is honest about what it is. Nobody looking at a half-built house mistakes it for a failed house. The poles are proof of intention, and everyone walking past can see where the thing is going.

Unfinished things in a life get treated less generously, usually by the person doing them — the course two years off a qualification, the manuscript at forty thousand words. It is permitted to feel something warm about a thing that is only partly there. The scaffolding counts as evidence.