This is why I started a diary. It's hard to understand who you are, what your interests are, what you were thinking about in the moment and how that changes over time. You have to some corpus of work that you can look back on to see that.
- You realize that your life was following an arc that you didn't realize at the time. e.g. you worked on similar projects, dated the same type of person etc but you can only see that when you look back in retrospection.
- Your perceived arc was really a series of random events in your life that you made the best of.
Both of these can be true because lives are complex and multifaceted. e.g. your dating life can be on an actual arc but your career can seem like an arc in hindsight but your diary shows that you just took whatever job seemed to be most interesting at the time.
You can easily overlook details you meticulously labored over in the past and fail to appreciate how much of it is now way over your head. You cannot assume you're "better" today just because you have more experience.
In fact, experience does have a tendency to throw away critical insights and give an arrogant and false sense of confidence. This doesn't only apply to judging your own work either. Just because something "worked out" for you doesn't mean you were right. Just because someone less experienced than you tries a different approach doesn't mean it can't work or maybe even be better than what you think you know now.
How many people spend too much of their later lives settling for the same patterns over and over wondering where their creative edge went? There it is, and it's all because you thought you figured something out that you never really did.
I just felt compelled to elaborate since I think journaling can easily become toxic and narcissistic. I think we can all fall into that accidentally.
The more you capture, the better your chances of catching yourself later.
I sense a lot of frustration in your comment. Perhaps it would do you well to journal.