Ship of Theseus
Every morning, I wake up to meet a version of myself I've never seen.
A gradual awakening, a shedding marked by one strand of insignificant hair to another, cells in your body dying and forming in every passing second. I've been cleaning the house as I go about building a home art studio, a lofty label for a space no larger than a child's sandbox. One person's living space is an accumulation of detritus, physical or otherwise: remnants of past me's that had slipped quietly in the night. Once upon a time I studied cybersecurity and finance and a dozen foreign languages. Once upon a time I was big into childhood education.
This is not a condemnation against consumptive culture. Physical or otherwise, because it's not just about things you shop for. Mental baggage counts too, and sometimes it's the heavier of the two. I think growing up is a reckoning that you will lose many things with time, including what you once considered the core of your identity. Along the way, things stopped to matter. However, you also get to discover things you never thought you would enjoy or even care about. While there's a certain sense of beautiful melancholia around it, I see it no reason to grieve. It's not inherently a bad thing, to keep reinventing ourselves. Indeed, that is what life is about: changes.
It's important for me because I have a hard time letting go. In difficult times, checklists keep me going until I could no longer move, each crossed item a signifier of progress. But progress to what? Where? The moment I could breathe, I see that I've been holding onto something for someone who had long died. Sometimes I have the clarity to know that I'd held onto everything so tightly because I was afraid of becoming something else, that I might turn into a version of me I would hate. Not that I do better on not-hating my current self, but I digress. 15 year old me would think of adult me as somewhat pathetic, I guess, but adult me would say I'm where I wanted to be.
You see, I never ended up embodying the "success" stories they'd dangled at the end of the stick, a hazy fruit for all the blood and tears. However, I'm surrounded by people I love and who loves me back, low maintenance but constant presence. I'm still alive. Most importantly, I'm still having it together in this bizarre economy. This is what success looks like that middle school me could never understand. And this is what I have to forgive them for. Today's me is composed of yesterday's me and last year's me, but I don't have to keep pretending they're still calling the shots.
The backlog I'd not get around to read/play/watch.
The plans I'm no longer excited to pursue.
Letting go is not forgetting. I was afraid that by dropping the goals from my list it would mean I'm extinguished of ambitions, that I no longer have the "growth mindset"1, and practically everything a FIRE-pilled arrogant teen believed was the key of a good life. I'm still learning new things. I have a new set of goals. The somedays had morphed into todays. Then what? I don't know. I may have a different answer tomorrow.
If that's the case, then I can just pick them up again. With renewed perspectives and vigor, even.
Maybe that's what makes Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii so particularly memorable for me, that despite everything he'd been through, Majima is still looking forward to see "the me I've yet to meet". It's absurd that it can take us many many many years to come to this realization, that it's alright to live for today's me.
I put this in quote because I think most of us, like teenage me, had only known this concept through its perversion in the world of airport business and self-help books instead of Carol Dweck's actual works↩