Ship of Me

I am a few weeks away from a milestone birthday, making me sentimental and reflective.

Do you know the Ship of Theseus thought experiment? It comes from the story of Theseus. Wikipedia explains: “Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?”

Are we the same? Are you the same person if your body replaces all of your cells? Our bodies do that to the tune of billions of cells per day.

About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.

What about if your belief system is dismantled and replaced? What about your values? What if you lose your memories one by one? Are you still you?

And if you’re not you, who are you?

Inside of me are fifty versions of Melissa, a patchwork quilt of Melissas. I can only identify a handful of things that were true at birth that are still true now, and maybe a handful more if we count from upper childhood. Everything else has been overwritten or replaced, like Theseus’s ship.

I’m just trying to mentally unpack it, trace the changes, and remember who I was and what I may be in the future.