Hiding Our older-Self

I had a thought today. We (people) are often ashamed of how we were like, or things we did as teenagers. Like maybe it was a poem you wrote, which you now think is pretentious or too emotional, or maybe it's your photos where you try to look sexy as hell, or you had your ponytail cover one eye for "cool effect", or maybe it's a love letter you wrote someone which now you think sounds super-naive and silly, your T-shirts that tried to project a certain image to make people like you, or how you recorded yourself singing, thinking you were a world class singer. But my thought was, that maybe those things, which we try to pretend never existed, are actually something to take pride of.

That was a time when we displayed our selves out in the open, naively, without a greater context, without considering or knowing how they will be received. They present some raw sides of us, in a way that today would require much more courage to show. So you may have been silly, but you were out there and you were real. So I think that should count for something.

That said, there are still things I did and wrote/ created back then which I will never show anyone alive now 😂😂

But I wonder if that's the best way to exist.