Who am I?

2025-09-18

Bearblog Carnival

As soon as I found out there was a blog carnival on Bear (and I found out what a blog carnival was) I knew I had to join. The topic for this month is how and when did you become a different person? If you find this prompt as interesting as I do, please check out the other carnivalgoers' contributions (and make your own!).

I went a little off the rails and kind of didn't even answer the question... but I had fun!

How and when did you become a different person?

This prompt was a lot harder to answer than I thought it would be. I was originally going to go very personal with this, but it turns out I'm not super comfortable with that, so I went really abstract.

The main thing I decided to explore here is that I see both of these statements as true even though they seem like opposites:

1. I am a different person every moment.
2. I have been the same person my whole life.

Let's get a little pretentious here, just for fun.

Part one: I am a collection of memories¹

I'm taking for granted that I am a collection of memories. It's something that seems straightforward to me, but I also could be wrong (and what do I mean by memory and collection, anyway? Who knows). Still, it's the best I can come up with off the top of my head.

1. I am a different person at every moment.

1. I am a collection of memories.
2. Because I am a collection of memories, when the collection changes, I change.
3. Every moment, a new memory is added to the collection, and existing memories in the collection change.
4. Therefore, every moment I am a different person.

2. I have been the same person my whole life.

1. I experience the world as a body.
   1. My experiences become my memories.
   2. I am a collection of memories.
   3. I become myself as a body.
2. My body has never changed in a way that prevents it from being the thing with/through which I experience the world.
3. Therefore, I have been the same person my whole life.

The second argument feels like it makes bigger leaps than the first, but I think there is something to the fact that my body will be my only body in this life. I just couldn't figure out how to word it. The thing I'm trying to get at is, in spite of constant change, we experience some kind of continuity. I'm not sure why, other than it's a story we tell, or a pattern we find/create.

Part two: I am a bodymind

All of this reminded me of something I encountered recently and thought would be fun to share, which is the concept of a bodymind. I first saw it in the context of disability studies, in Margaret Price's book, Crip Spacetime. Maybe it will also help you interpret your experiences.

It's common in the western philosophical tradition to think of our bodies and minds as separate. That's certainly what I learned: that you are in a body, and your mind is the real you, which could somehow, theoretically, be separated from your physical existence.

I find this hard to buy, first and foremost because as far as we know, the thing that produces your mind (your brain) is a body part. But more than that, there is no you without the thing that allows you to experience your life--your body--all the organs that give your brain something to make sense of. I feel that the separation of the mind and body (and the assumed primacy of the mind) is an extension of the hierarchy of logic over emotion, man over woman, humanity over the rest of the natural world.

In reality, I think, all of these things just exist, affecting each other in tandem, and the hierarchies are socially imposed.

I will never take away the separation of mind and body from those who find it comforting, but for those like me, who don't find it comforting, the bodymind makes a lot of sense. It acknowledges something we feel, which is that our physical and mental lives are inextricable from each other. I am my mind is my body.

Notes

#carnival #carnival/bearblog #philosophy