The style you outgrow may once have helped you enter a room more confidently.

Old styles were solutions to old problems. The clothes, the accent, the way of standing that you now find embarrassing were doing a job at the time, usually the job of getting you through a door where you were not sure you belonged. Cringing at them is a way of forgetting that the person who chose them was managing something. They worked well enough to get you here.

When an old photograph makes you wince, name what you were dealing with that year. Give the earlier version credit for the strategy rather than marks for the taste.