Getting progressively stupider.

Last year, when we moved from big house in the suburbs to smaller apartment in the city, I finally went through and purged the 4-5 boxes of school stuff I've been moving with me from one place to another (and I've moved 4-5 times in the last 7 years). I reasoned that after 7 years, if I still hadn't pulled out a single bible of class notes or looked at anything I'd produced in my 5 years of college+M.Eng, then I never would. As I went through my boxes, though, I stopped to read through some of my old assignments, tests and papers, and ended up feeling both very stupid and very confused. I had no recollection of ever learning like 75% of what I read, and was rather blown away by how intelligent I apparently used to be.

I just had a similar experience - my manager recommended I sign up for this new mentoring program at work that's supposed to be good for career advancement, and to apply, you have to fill out this application form and submit a resume. Some of the questions ask about how many papers I've published, presentations I've given, classes I've taken at work, etc... Whenever I finish doing anything, I think I just purge it from my mind, so I started going through my old emails to see if I could remind myself what papers I'd written. I started reading some old email threads and was actually both impressed and saddened by some of my emails in these threads. Apparently I used to know how to do stuff, and analyze stuff, and whatever... Somehow I came away from those projects thinking I'd contributed nothing and knew nothing, but when I read these threads, apparently I knew *something*. But now I don't remember it.

I suppose in a couple years I'll look back at what I've done in my current project and be impressed by what I knew and figured out how to do. But at the moment, I feel ignorant and inexperienced and like I'm just implementing what other people tell me how to do.

Why can't I ever feel as intelligent *now* as I do when I look back at myself? And why am I getting progressively stupider? Sigh...