“I’m not that person anymore.”
The asshole ex you never wanted to hear from again. An estranged relative. Celebrities and politicians outed for some crime in the distant (or recent!) past. Addicts on their eighth step. Religious converts. They claim absolution by a species of transubstantiation: yes, these eyes, this chin, this voice, these hands, they look like those of the person who hurt you, but they, like the communion wafer, have changed—if not in appearance, in essence.
If that’s a hard sell for a cracker, it seems particularly dubious for a human.
And yet, unlike most baked goods, humans clearly do change over the course of our lifetimes. The natural transition from zygote to embryo to screaming baby seems like clear evidence of the human potential for change. Even after we fully mature into adults and end our period of rapid development, the changes to our bodies, minds and outlooks are constant and inexorable. Whole industries have been built on the concept of arresting those changes, that through enough “wellness” and meditation and hyaluronic acid injections you can “live well” …forever. (Forever-ever? Forever-ever?!)
Capitalists reject the notion of death, which means they reject the notion of any change besides growth, any motivation besides accumulation. ‘Better’ and ‘more’ are the only welcome adverbs to a capitalist; ‘less’ and ‘worse’ serve merely as agents of moral condemnation. Any of the inevitable billions ground into the lead-infused dirt of late-stage capitalism are not merely abandoned but damned by their own hand: their failure to ‘manifest,’ their lack of moral fiber, the pleather in their bootstraps.
And yet, reality persists, despite the capitalist desire to leave it like a monster in the dark, unseen and unnamed. We do change, every second of every day. We grow and we shrink, we gain and we lose, we move through time like a river, each self encountering it a little different than the one before. When looked at from this perspective, we are none of us who we used to be. We are reborn every quantum moment. Every year, 98% of the atoms in our bodies are replaced with another. Our skin sheds 500 million cells per day. Our brains are constantly generating new connections, if not entirely new neurons—and losing them too, at a pace that increases with age. Am I the same person that I was as at seven years old? At twenty? At thirty?
Perhaps I can define a personal watershed moment for myself, and put the rest behind me. So: before I moved to Mexico on New Year’s Day 2014, I was one Alaya, and on January 2nd 2024, I became another. But what about moving from Mexico City to rural Oaxaca? Am I now Alaya 2.5? 3.0? Oh, and what about when I left my parents’ house for New York? Or when I finally broke up with my first boyfriend? Those were moments of huge change in my life. Does that make me Alaya 4.5, now? And if so, what responsibility does Alaya 4.5 have for harms caused by past editions? Have any of them achieved a full absolution, a bathing in the river, a cleansing of the past in order to dedicate herself fully to the new life? In that case, I’d have as little relation to my past crimes as I do to those of my parents or my siblings. I can sorrow for harms Alaya 2.0 might have caused, but I feel no deeper connection to them.
This is certainly the preferred ontological landscape of the abuser embarrassed to be confronted with their past actions, but it does not feel quite convincing. After all, unlike the potential crimes of my parents and my siblings, I remember living through those experiences and taking those actions. My neurons formed shapes directly related to actions that I took, and while those neuronal connections might change over the course of decades, they still remain part of the history of my brain, and therefore they still inform its future. Alaya 2.0 is part of Alaya 4.5, even if Alaya 4.5 is more than the sum of her past selves.
It is this history, this continuity embedded in shape and memory, that makes it uncontroversial for me to say that 41-year-old Alaya and seven-year-old Alaya are the same person. I am not only or merely her, but she is part of me in the way that all of my past moments form part of the history that makes up an individual. This is what people mean when they talk about finding their inner child, I think. The act of reaching back into the thought processes and shape of that past self can genuinely feel like inhabiting that other version of you; or, even more tantalizingly, speaking as you are now with that past version of you. Even in cases of literal metamorphosis, where a creature rearranges its cells in order to transform into an entirely different body and ecological niche, scientists can measure the movement of those neurons and how memory and continuity might still persist across the chasm of this rebirth1. If even a butterfly has fair cause to stand trial for the crimes of its caterpillar past, then I have no truck with Klansmen at medical school halloween parties or high school rapists who want to pretend that the respectable trappings of their current lives absolve them of their “wild pasts.” Jason Isbell has a brilliant song that deconstructs this phenomenon, “Live oak.”
As those who happened to be there for my Wiscon 39 Guest of Honor speech in 2015 will know, I am not the biggest fan of murder ballads as a genre. But I do love me a deconstructed murder ballad, and this is a fascinating one. The narrator begins with his refrain, a pensive worry about his disreputable past affecting his current partner’s view of him.
“There's a man who walks beside me He is who I used to be And I wonder if she sees him And confuses him with me”
At first this seems like the story of a man worried that his bad past will poison his reformed present. But as the song goes on, we get a different picture. His partner has always been attracted to that hint of violence in him. Like many women before her, she guesses the truth but tragically underestimates the depth. How deep? To the water table line, where he buries her beneath a cross of live oak after she knows or wants too much. There was no man walking beside him; all this time, it was only ever just him.
There can be nothing approaching true repentance unless it comes with full acceptance. The past is not all of us, but it is ours, just as our cells are ours even if the atoms in them have refreshed themselves a couple times in the interim. That feeling of belonging, of cohesion, of every part of your body and your past being part of your present—that is both gift and responsibility.
Not everything that we carry in our bodies and brains is our choice or our fault, of course. It would be an error to blame yourself for the abuse you suffered. In my experience, abusers are far less likely than their victims to carry the shame of their actions. If they really accepted the truth of what they had done, after all, wouldn’t they want to make amends, and not merely scramble for damage control after being confronted? Instead, they heap the worst of themselves on our backs until we feel disarticulated, so weighed down beneath the excrement of what we had no choice over that we forget where our bodies end and their shame begins. They twist us into the perfect receptacle for their shit and then blame us looking like a toilet. We can untwist ourselves, of course. We can climb out from under that shitpile, discover our miraculously whole, discrete bodies, and clean ourselves off. But first we have to separate what is our fault from what is our responsibility. We have to separate the shame that belongs to them from the duty to ourselves that belongs to us.
It can feel like too much to accept responsibility for the effects of things that we did not choose or want. But it is the only possible way to live happily as the person you are—the person who survived them. There was a time when I longed for the sharp bifurcation, the complete rebirth, the signal that the Alaya of before had disengaged like a spent rocket engine and separated herself completely from the Alaya of now. But I could not do that and heal. I could not reject that small child, my Alaya 1.0, overwhelmed but full of fire. I had to let her back in. She’d never left me, had never died, never been swallowed by the ocean. I cried with happiness when I finally found her.
All this time, she was only ever just me.
Thank you so much for reading! Please leave a comment if you’re so inclined, or share with others. There’s a lot more to this subject that I haven’t touched on, like how the memory loss that trauma so often induces affects one’s sense of self and continuity, or how gaslighting works to erase identity through the invalidation of memory. If you’re interested in reading more of my essays about this or related topics, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you haven’t already. I am so grateful to everyone who has subscribed so far, paid and free, and I hope that as this goes on I can find a wider audience for this type of work.
Remember, Frijolito wants you to…
Yes, I know the first part of the article says that they don’t persist, but the second half brings up evidence that they might in more complex metamorphoses in other species.