Reading your old texts is like watching a documentary about someone you used to know.

Old messages preserve a version of you that your memory has already edited. The person in them uses different words, worries about different things, and talks to people who are no longer around. Recognizing them and not quite being them is a strange feeling, and it is also proof that you moved. Memory smooths the change, but the record does not.

Scroll back a couple of years and read a few without cringing at them on purpose. Notice one thing that person cared about that you have quietly dropped. Ask whether you dropped it because you outgrew it or because you got busy.