Past posts

I’ve been doing a little spring clean of my site lately, and casting my eye over some old posts. It’s a bit like hearing your voice on tape. Disconcertingly familiar, and yet, not exactly how you imagined yourself to sound: younger, less polished, more naive.

It’s a bit like flicking through a photo album of yourself from a different era, where your clothes suddenly look out of date despite being once the height of fashion, and you find yourself wondering how you ever thought crimping looked cool.  With past posts it’s similar – you revisit a version of yourself you’ve moved on from and about whom you feel slightly superior, even scornful, as you did the first years at school when you had finally reached third form. The cares and frustrations that preoccupied you back then have faded into insignificance, and now seem trite and petty. It takes an effort of will not to go back and edit myself into a more mature version, the one who knows that things will turn out okay.

But if I do that, the time capsule I’m creating for myself, and to a lesser extent, my family, will be contaminated with the future. There comes a point with old photos where you start viewing your past through rosy tinted lenses, where you feel a flood of affection for the child you once were or the mother you were about to become.The further you move on, the more compassion you can feel for yourself – the pictures you once hated for showcasing an awkward angle or spotty skin seem re-filtered as you notice your shining eyes and toned arms as if for the first time, and miss the figure you once despised.

Perhaps through the distance of fifty years, I will envy myself my future and feel sad about how often I felt alone. Perhaps I will want to give myself a shake, or a cuddle and feel frustrated at my frustrations, which are inevitably be less complicated now than they will become with age. Hopefully I will be proud of myself, for plodding on despite life’s inevitable setbacks, with few regrets, even for all the days when I felt like I couldn’t. I hope the day doesn’t come when I feel the need to delete.

I’ve always written to try to make something permanent out of life’s transiency and if this is my aim, I have to put up with the cringe stage of old blogs in the same way I did with snaps if myself as a teenager in the knowledge that one day I will see the beauty – and awkwardness in them that may not be obvious to me through the short-sighted perspective of just a year or two’s distance.