It's strange how you grow as a person, isn't it ?  It's rather like the hands of a clock slowly moving:  change is incremental and only becomes noticeable every now and again.  Growing as a person, your tastes change, your ideas improve and become more complex, and what seemed once quite sophisticated and daring now looks hoplelessly gauche and naive.  I'm not talking here about art or photography necessarily (although it can apply), but any creative activity - any expressive outlet for the soul.  As I state in my little profile paragraph, I took up photography (and the art I create from it) only a handful of years ago, so I have little to beat myself up over or become embarrassed about as regards older work (though time will change this, I have no doubt!)  No, the pit that I am speedily digging for myself here concerns another artistic form of self-expression, that of literature.  I suppose this journal is a sort of add-on to my profile:  I talk very little about myself on dA; my pictures speak for themselves and apart from 'The Undiscovered Country' are not mouthpieces for own moods or emotions, are never gateways into my soul.  But my writing is, and boy I seem to have been writing as a hobby for a long-time now!  'Hmm', you may think, 'I've never seen any kind of literature posted by him on deviantART...' - and that is my point exactly:  how difficult is it to live with work that you have created, have spent many hours forging in pained solitude, have finally looked on in its completion with pride (be it art or literature, or anything expressive) only to realise as the years pass that the work you are producing in the here and now far eclipses what once you treasured ?  That's not to say that your work from years before is worthless, is rubbish - on the contrary:  amidst the dust may be many gems, many gleaming fragments; but nevertheless they still lie in dust.  The structure of that older work lacks clarity or focus; it was produced by someone far less sophisticated in thought, although maybe fizzing with a creative energy that in comparison seems lacking today.  That is the beautiful irony of it all:  the mental slowdown that comes upon us over time, the sense of peace that is part of a self-confidence we never realised we'd aquired until it was screaming at us(!) are undoubtedly benefits; but so is the desperate mental pace of our younger selves.  I hope this all makes sense...   So what do we do with this work then, these little gems that we still quietly love ?  We can't display them, put them up there with our very best work; neither can we destroy them - that would be beyond all thinking.  Like the emperor's new clothes, we can see the truth of them, that they aren't and never will be up to scratch:  to bring them up our current standards would be to transform them beyond all recognition, to rip the very heart and soul from them - and every piece of art has a soul.

It is a dilemma, isn't it ?  Answers on a postcard, please...