Last night I went into the depths of the guest bathroom (for use only by cats) and brought out two big dusty boxes, still sealed from my move. I cleaned them of their lightly-scented clay dust coating, opened them up, and pulled out a big pile of my history.

And holy crap, that was a lot of art.

It was pretty cathartic to go through, deciding what I liked well enough to eventually put up on Etsy or my (soon to be launched) new art site, and what I wanted to keep for sentiment or self-archiving purposes. The best pile, though, is the rejects.

Stuff I was never that happy with, but kept because I had teachers who said, “Never throw anything away.” Stuff I liked once but have grown out of or away from. Stuff that just never quite came together right. Stuff I hated right off the bat.

Old Stuff.

I have a pile of it in the corner now, but one piece has already been sacrificed to the Etsy gods — I took a mediocre monoprint, cut it up and remade it into a gorgeous blue origami gift box, sturdy and rough and interesting. And now it sits atop that pile of Stuff and reminds me that there’s no such thing as a failure in art, because old art becomes new art supplies.

And the best part, of course, was revisiting old pieces that I do still love, and thinking about whether I’m ready to show them to other people, to send them off to new homes, to get them out of their dusty prisons and into the world where they belong.

And you know what? I think I am.