I am a writer. I don’t mean that I just write articles (often at the last minute) and post them here so that you guys, girls, and everyone else can read them, click the share button, and move on with your lives, maybe having learned a little bit about the music that I’m into that week or the political topic I’ve chosen to write about. I write because it is part of who I am. If I’m not tapping out words on a keyboard, I’m scribbling them down in a notebook. And if I’m not doing that, I’m brainstorming what I’ll write next; the next poem, the next article, the next chapter in the book that I’ve been working on forever and am never going to finish—it doesn’t matter as long as I’m writing something. But part of writing is revisiting old things I’ve written, and that can get interesting at times, because just like we change as we get older, writing styles change, and we improve. Which can lead to some scary questions, like…

What was I thinking when I wrote this?

One of the most common things I find myself wondering when I look at things in my notebook, or documents on my Google Drive, is “what was going through my mind?” I mean that in two ways. There’s the “What was this even about?” kind, and the “Did I really think that this was any good?” kind. Honestly, it’s a lot more of the latter, but that’s okay, because there are other questions that can arise. For example:

Why didn’t I keep working on this?

This is another one, albeit less common for me, that I find myself wondering when I look through old writing. The other day, I found a binder full of spiral bound notebooks (that I had, for some reason, put into the three-ring binder). Inside of them was the first (and only) book that I ever finished. It was two yellow one-subject notebooks that contained a hackneyed story about a very self-insert character that goes through the most cliché obstacles any while male teenage protagonist has ever had just the right skillset to breeze through. It was, and I say this with no shame, one of the worst things I have ever written. Honestly, it was terrible. And I laughed the whole time, because I could see the things that I still do in my writing that an eleven-year-old me did when he thought he was writing the best thing since "Harry Potter." Plus, I could see the things that I’d thankfully stopped doing, things that made me wonder…

Why did I ever start this?

Inside one of those yellow notebooks was the sequel to the book I mentioned above. It made, to be short, absolutely no sense at all. for some reason I’d skipped about five hundred years between the two stories, resurrected a dead main character, and retconned another three deaths. For some reason, I had no qualms in doing this, and I knew no reason why anyone who would ever read this would question why any of these plot points were happening.

And realizing all these things, asking all these questions, being horrified by my old writing, those are all good things. They’re great, in fact. Because on days when I open a word document and stare at it, thinking I’ll never write anything decent again, and being certain that my writing is the worst it’s ever been, I can look back at my Mary Sues and know that, hey, at least I’m not writing about kids running around with magic swords trying to prevent the end of the world. Now I’m writing about angels running around with magic swords trying to save the world.