When I go back to read the stuff I write I think mostly “damn that guy sounds like a psycho”

Yes. Mostly about the “I can’t believe I wrote that”. What you’re doing is self-reflection, and that’s a good thing. It’s good that you can recognize things you’ve said before that you’ve learned from. I don’t feel like enough people do this.

Sometimes I’m surprised by how eloquent I can sound.

I’m rarely surprised by how stilted and incoherent I can sound. I’m used to that.

“I’m a million different people from one day to the next; I can’t change my mould, no no.” — Bittersweet Symphony

We all show rotating aspects of ourselves, but we remain fundamentally the same. Unless something drastic happens that changes how those aspects present or function anyway.

(Maybe that lyric doesn’t mean what I’m reading into it, but it’s what I’ve taken from it. That’s a funny thing about art.)

So yeah, I’ve looked back through comments I’ve made and realised that I knew something at the time that I’d since forgotten, and seen how smart I’d been - or how utterly cringe-inducing, and known that at some point, that if the cringe is bound to return, so might the smart. Hopefully. Maybe. Please.

There’s also the fact that we distil ourselves down for a comment. Present the best side, or the best of the aspect we’re going for. Even trolls do this. Unfortunately. So when we look back, not at all in the same frame of mind that we were at the time, it’s like looking at the highlights of someone else’s life on some other social media, not seeing everything else that’s going on besides.

I probably won’t remember all the edits and corrections I’ve made to this comment before submitting the first time. Only time knows how future me will perceive it, should I ever look back.

For me it’s less about smarter/dumber, and more about the way that I convey my ideas. I see older posts and sometimes I say “damn, I should write more like this”; sometimes “this is a fucking mess, I should’ve clarified better”.

“I’m a jack of all trades, master of none,” type of person. Most of the time old posts are a reflection of how far I have come, but occasionally they are a fun reminder of how deep I got down some rabbit hole in the past. I like it when they remind me of some detail I wouldn’t easily remember.

Most of the time I find them a little bit introspectively cringe, maybe a little less than they did a decade ago or more. I hope the reflective cringe is always the case, because to me, that means I continue to grow.