Learning feels slow because you only notice it looking back. Keep the old work to prove it.

Progress is invisible from inside it. Each day moves you a fraction, which is too small to feel, and your sense of how good you are keeps updating to the present, so you always seem to have been here all along. The proof lives in old work, where your past self is still making mistakes you no longer make.

Keep things rather than throwing them out: an essay from last year, a recording of yourself playing badly, the first drawings, a photo of an early attempt. Look at one when you feel stuck. It is the only evidence that the slow feeling has been lying to you.