Take me seriously - please?

I recently re-read Bellies for a current project, the first time since the final copy-edit four years ago. Until now, I hadn’t feel the need because I thought I remembered most of it, and the idea of doing so made me feel sick. Everybody wants to experience growth, but nobody wants to be reminded of what they’ve grown from. My line of thinking has been: it’s in the past and nothing could be changed (why does Tom become a model, exactly, and why is Ming such a potty mouth?).

An avoidance of one’s old work is a fairly normal experience. In an interview last year, Zadie Smith shared that she still hasn’t reread White Teeth, the novel that made her a star, though she admired “its energy and humour from a fond distance”. Despite this fondness, she has also written that she “got about ten sentences in” before she “was overwhelmed with nausea”.

The internet is replete with clips of actors who are sick of the projects they feel they’ve outgrown (a personal favourite: compilations of Robert Pattinson hating Twilight). A recent interview with Lisa Kudrow, in which she says plainly that Friends gave her everything, was met warmly – a comment with over 17k likes says “I love this!! I hate it when actors downplay the vehicles that made them!!!”. I am neither famous nor Zadie Smith, and I am certainly not Robert Pattinson, but I am often repulsed at the idea of having to dwell on my old work, my old writing, and most of all my old mistakes. But what if that’s where the magic is?