Memory

Memory is such a strange thing. I feel like future me and past me are strangers to myself. I feel alienated from my own self. Like I do not know who I am. Who I was before and who I will be tomorrow, are all strangers. It really enhances the isolation when even in your own company you have only limited access to yourself . That you can never truly know someone else but in a way you can never know yourself either. That everything is elusive and vague. Maybe I will not like who I was, or who I am. In this rejection of myself I am no more a comfort to myself than the rest of society: the people who always love to point out your flaws and shortcomings.  In as much, I am more a part of that external society than I am of internal me. I am more the world’s than I am my own . 

Being a foreigner to yourself certainly has a strange feeling associated with it. Suddenly I am two and not one, in terms of action and observation. Or I am three and not one, in terms of copies a long time streams. Or I am infinite, in terms of every passing unit of time, Forever changing and divided and never the same.

In this mutability perhaps the soul is a constant, an essence, for what else can be constant within me? Even your cells are replaced so no part of your original body remains. It is the ship of Theseus. Am I the same , and if not, at what point did I change? When do I cease to be one me and become another?  Memory is what links your past and your future. But it is such a fickle thing, confabulated thoughts and cognitive biases.  To what ideas and thoughts do I use to define myself? To what essence can I cling to so I don't feel lost and estranged from myself?