Reflecting on old poems
I picked up my old poems notebook to choose one to translate and post here, and although there were some okay ones which didn't make me cringe, most of it now seems silly. Not in the literal way, but in the way that I was trying to get validated so hard by writing them. I used to search for synonyms to words that came to mind so that I could find more complex versions and use those instead.
It reveals a thought that what I wrote only had value if it was deep, grandiose, filled with difficult words I had never used before. For a 18 year old in the middle of the pandemic this checks out, yet it doesn't make me cringe less upon reading them. I'm not nullifying their worth, it was a lot of fun writing them and sharing with a couple of friends, and I can remember well that I felt relieved after expressing myself in that way.
I think I subconsciously made them complex so that I would feel less embarrassed by writing, I remember fearing someone would find my notebook and read them and laugh or humiliate me, of course this is absurd and exaggerated but I can see how this was something on the back of my mind, which ended up masking my writing so I would have the courage to do it. I still have this strange shame when writing, especially in public, but I'm doing my best to overcome it.
I also felt like it wasn't me who wrote them. Maybe because the words weren't "mine" in the sense I searched for them, and not came up with them by myself. In a way it was another version of me who wrote them, so I guess this is expected.
Being able to review them and notice these things gives me a feeling of progress, like seeing old drawings or old code that is not on your level anymore. I still appreciate them, though they don't reflect my current self, which is okay, we're constantly changing, as the saying goes:
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.