this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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I don't know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.

What I'm trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can't stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren't they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can't bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.

What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don't know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I'm bored, stressed or relaxed.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Depends on how you define death. If death is only physical and biological, then no, you are very much alive.

If death is metaphorical yes, we die and we are reborn every second. We live in constant state of transformation, not crossing the same river twice and all that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I highly recommend the book Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz. It’s helped me a lot, and boils down to the idea that we have “parts,” and that our thoughts and feelings can sometimes be diametrically opposite.

It, along with being able to speak with zero inhibitions to my therapist that makes me feel heard and my thoughts not seem batshit insane, has really brought up a lot of old memories and scared parts of myself. What I thought was anxiety, I’m learning to notice as a fear I’ve had for as long as I can remember, and that fear helped me survive a lot of my early years of trauma.

https://ifs-institute.com

I can guarantee that this book will give you a sense of the answer you’re asking for.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I've always thought of that as renewal of the self instead of the self dying.

Your personality is based largely upon your human experience.

As you get older and experience more, you have more things from the world around you to use to orient your thoughts and feelings on the world, and because thoughts and feelings are what the human experience is at its basest level, it will change your personality continuously.

I experienced much the same through and up into my mid twenties. I have found that upon reaching my 30's that it does not happen as much, or at least it takes much more thought and feeling to change my personality.

You too will reach a point where you obtain a certain confidence in who you are and what you actually believe in, and after that, you will not experience the feeling of being a different person every couple of years as much.

My advice to you since you recognize this in yourself is to pay attention to it. If you can realize that it is possible you could be a different person in a couple years, who would you want to be? What would make you happy?

Focus on that, use it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

How do you know you can't become those past selves again? If you did have that ability imagine what that would be like...

Let's say you want to bring back your middle school self. You would forget everything that came after middle school, you would become that middle schooler again. Not only that, but to truly be your past self, you would have to be in the same situation, place, point in time. Otherwise the change in environment would be reflected in a change in your mind and that change would mean you are a new person, not your past self. To truly become your past self, you would just be back in middle school and the future would still be ahead. If you pressed a button that did that, after you pressed the button you would not and could not know anything happened at all.

Going beyond that, maybe you have the ability to become your future selves as well. Maybe you have both of these abilities and you just don't know, can't know. If you did, you couldn't tell.

For all you know, in between every moment you jump around and become every version of yourself. Maybe every possible version of yourself. Maybe in between every moment you become every person that has ever lived or will ever live. Every saint and murderer, every animal and bug, every rock and star and black hole. Everything and everyone. And in all that jumping around you would eventually land back to this current moment and version of you, except one timestep in the future. And you wouldn't know any of that jumping around happened, because to be you in this moment you can't be anything else.

You are not separate from the universe, you are the universe. Past, present, and future.

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