Reading your old journals and cringing is good news. It means you’ve moved.

Discomfort at your own old writing is a distance measurement. You can only wince at something if you now know better, which makes the wince evidence rather than embarrassment. Somebody who reads an entry from two years ago and finds nothing awkward in it has stayed exactly where they were. The feeling is unpleasant and the news is good.

Go find something you wrote a while back, an entry, an old post, a message thread. Read it without deleting anything. Name one specific thing you would say differently now, because that difference is growth you have no other way of seeing.