Juvenilia

After a long enough period of time nothing I write appears to me to make much sense. What was I thinking then? Or, if I remember well enough the idea, why did I frame it this way? The wrong words, the wrong atmosphere - some chain of thought that seemed solid then, but in retrospect has not been welded together at all.

Juvenilia. (Of course I'm not *that* old, but age is still relative. Youth is a time of swift aging.)

But I don't discard the pieces from three or five years back when I clear my store of documents. The things that do go are those from three days back, which have already lost their apparent coherence or rightness after half a weeks' revisions and redecisions. This habit of clearing things out is an old one, from my high school years.

Therefore the conclusion - whoever I was at the time of writing my oldest crap, I must have thought it truly worthy then. Errors of judgement aside (also, I don't do drugs) I must have loved then the same thing that makes me gape in embarrassment now. Why did I love them then? And why do I keep them now?

I suspect the latter is to convince me that I am making some sort of progress, that what was 'good' then is indeed egregious by now, which must mean that my constant process of maturation has brought (is bringing, hopefully) my skills in creative writing to new heights. Onward and upward. But now even that seems a misconception. I think I have a better answer now - that I am simply a different person than I was before, and that my self-righteousness, whether deserved or not, requires as fuel the writing of another person to mock and be ashamed at - someone who was young, and has since failed to grow up while remaining the same person.