Ship of Theseus

Every morning, I wake up to meet a version of myself I've never seen. A gradual awakening, a shedding marked by one strand of insignificant hair to another, cells in your body dying and forming in every passing second. I've been cleaning the house as I go about building a home art studio, a lofty label for a space no larger than a child's sandbox. One person's living space is an accumulation of detritus, physical or otherwise: remnants of past me's that had slipped quietly in the night. Once upon a time I studied cybersecurity and finance and a dozen foreign languages. Once upon a time I was big into childhood education. This is not a condemnation against consumptive culture. Physical or otherwise, because it's not just about things you shop for. Mental baggage counts too, and sometimes it's the heavier of the two. I think growing up is a reckoning that you will lose many things with time, including what you once considered the core of your identity. Along the way, things stopped to…