i honestly wasn't sure whether or not i should answer this ask, if i had anything constructive to say here. "i'm glad you like my work, thanks for the kind words, and remember comparison is the thief of joy" felt hollow somehow.
so, i'm going to waffle for a bit and hope that maybe some of it is helpful to somebody
from your wording, i'm assuming you're on the younger side, anon. i wish i'd kept some of my work from when i first started writing poetry (i think i was around 12?). i think you'd find i absolutely did not start here - but i did start, and kept going, and that's how these things happen. kept going is maybe misleading, too past simple. it's past continuous, really, or rather it's present continuous, i'm still going. if you think i hold my work in particularly high regard, you'd be wrong. i'm incredibly self-critical. but the thing about that criticism is that it can be constructive or it can be destructive. self-deprecation only imbues you with a sense of defeat, leads to black-and-white and eternity thinking, identification. "my poetry is bad" -> "my poetry will never be any good" -> "i am a bad writer" -> "i might as well give up" (there's a second fork in that road, depending on the type of person you are. you might admit defeat or launch into a perfectionism attack of the self, dedicate yourself wholly to improvement without any hope of actually ever feeling like you're improving because of the impossible standard you've set for yourself).
there's a great many days i hate all my work. everything i've ever written, like i can't even bear to look at any of it - this extends far past writing. every other creative endeavour feels like that sometimes. everything in my life does. to a degree, i think that's just the nature of being an artist. but it can get out of hand fast (particularly, and i'm genuinely not going to make assumptions here so this is purely an if, if your brain, like mine, is at time of writing not exactly user-friendly. i don't know if i've ever outright mentioned the C-PTSD thing on this blog but i assume it comes through in my work - some of it keeps getting tagged with C-PTSD, anyway. the black-and-white/all-or-nothing -> eternity thinking -> identification -> perfectionism or self-destruction spiral is a path i have gone down many, many times in my life, with just about everything i love and care about).
reframing tends to be helpful when i get stuck like that, especially in the case of something subjective like poetry. "all my work sucks" is not a constructive place to be, i don't do good work there. "all my work is amazing" isn't a helpful counter-argument, because a, there's no way to actually prove that sort of thing and b, that sort of thinking implies there's no room for improvement, which there always is. a helpful reframing for me, and the reason i bother sharing my work at all, is, "my work has been meaningful to people. it resonates." i know that from feedback. and i value that immensely. in the absence of positive feedback like that, however, another helpful reframing is, "my work is meaningful to me. creating it is an act of self-expression that has brought me a lot of joy."
i encourage you to keep writing, anon. reading and writing and doing both lots really are the only ways to improve, but improving aside (there will always be room to improve; there will always be someone better), i encourage you to look within as to why you started writing at all, why you do it. what are your reasons? writing is one from of having a voice. what do you want to say to the world (or maybe just to yourself?)
