Did Being an Emo Bitch Make Me Genuine?

The image to the left was done in 2004, I was about 17. Sorry that it's not work safe. Anyway, I've been thinking that the art I've been doing for the last couple years seems very dishonest compared to what I drew in high school.

I was very much a teenager as a teenager, but I don't think I had anymore angst or insecurities then your average 16 year old. It's pretty obvious that I was putting a lot of what I was thinking and feeling into my art (not what I was doing though. didn't do drugs, smoke, drink, or harm myself.) in a really blunt way. People around me didn't get it, and to some extent I don't think I got it either. Something compelled me to draw, and that's what I did. I wasn't worried about what other people thought, or how my art fit into the entirety of the art world. What I was drawing was uninformed, and isolated from pretty much everything.

Now, after college, I have so much more to consider when I draw. The biggest thing weighing on my mind is the eternal question: "What does it mean?" Ok, so all art doesn't have to "mean" something, but art professionals will not think something has no meaning unless you tell them blatantly. Plus I don't think that art meaning something or existing in a context is a bad thing; if a viewer picks up on a feeling from your art it's an amazing feeling. In the same vein as coming up with meaning, I do want to have narrative aspects of my art, and I want it to look good, and I want it to look like someone older then 15 made it. There's all this stuff to consider, and I think it gets in the way of raw honesty. I don't think my art from 2004 was better, but I do think the emotion was stronger, and the viewer got more. The argument against that is that I was being really obvious, but I'm not going to touch that with a 10 food pole.

Unfortunately for me I don't think there is any conclusion I can come to about this. I'm stuck being who I am now, even though it's interesting to look back there isn't anything in the past that can be recaptured, or should be recaptured.