Almost everything I've written seems wrong now

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I made a new friend recently, and I was anticipating that perhaps she’d read some of my writing, as part of the befriending process. This caused me some dread, as I realized that I’d prefer she skip the vast majority of what I’ve produced. In fact, there are maybe a dozen pieces that I wouldn’t hesitate to send her, if queried. Everything else seems wrong now, and that’s maybe 4-5 books worth of material.

A lot of it, I flat-out disagree with. The writing I produced in my 20s was histrionic in a way that I currently find adorable. It was filled with declarative statements about life that now transparently read as a defense against complexity. Also, I was paid to do some boilerplate anti-Trump writing about eight years ago, and I’m not pro-Trump now, but I’m not a cookie cutter progressive anymore, and I cringe at the simplistic conviction with which I recited all the ambient progressive memes. My only defense is that I needed the money, and that was what I could get paid for at the time. 

Not everything I’ve produced is so obviously wrong—a lot of it is wrong in subtler ways. Even writing I produced a year ago, I’m really not sure about. The rate of learning in my life is high, and there are axioms I took for granted quite recently which I now feel shifting. Looking back on writing I did about my abundant happiness, I can see that there were patches of darkness I was still avoiding. And, frustratingly, as my thinking becomes more complex, it gets more difficult to summarize, so it is hard to write new work that rebuts the old work. It also seems much more efficient to simply write things that contradict what I’ve said before without explanation. 

I make my peace with this situation by remembering that the writing I do is not ultimately for me. When I think about what I can write that will make me look wonderful in the future, I produce bullshit or nothing. I am a lot happier and more productive when I think of this as a sacrifice, or offering. Different creatures emit differently, and this is the effluvium I naturally produce. Here I lay my thoughts like a body left in a field for the pleasure of vultures. If what I produce is wrong, let the reader who knows better feel the pleasurable warmth of self-righteousness. If what I produce is shameful, I hope that the vicarious shame felt by my readers will help them crystallize their values.

Some people organize their lives based on trying to avoid regrets later on. I think that’s crazy. I don’t want to act today in order to appease the elderly tyrant who inherits my bone structure and legal identity. That person can blame their embarrassment on me if they want to, such is the generosity of my offering. I’m not going to deny them that. Likewise, I’m definitely going to judge the scared young person who wrote down all of the transparent bids for affirmation that now bear my name. But I am thankful that he left me such abundant fuel for midnight scoffing.