One of the interesting things about getting a little older (and, yes I understand that depending on your perspective, thirty-nine is not very old at all) is that you accumulate things: experiences, memories, and in the case of a writer, old stuff you've written.
I'm going to be moving in a couple months and so, in preparation, I've started digging through some of the boxes hidden in the back of my closet. Last week while doing this, I came upon several shoe boxes full of my older writing-related items: notebooks full of hand-written notes and stories, a few printed out copies of things I'd submitted to various writing workshops, and a bunch of rejection letters from story submissions.
A blogger I follow recently wrote something to the effect that one of the reasons he writes is to remember his life a little better. Looking back at all this old writing, much dating back fifteen years or so, I see how much truth is in this. While some of the old writing I dug through was indeed non-fiction or thinly veiled auto-fiction--and so it literally helped me remember things--even those pieces that were completely fabricated brought me back to the headspace I was in during my early and mid twenties. The experience was both cringe-inducing and enlightening. I was also pleasantly surprised by the fact that I actually still like some of the pieces I wrote back then.
In any event, one of the things I want to take on over the next few months is to edit, and maybe even submit, some of those old pieces. I might even post one or two of them here.