What does it mean to have changed?

My writing tends to start with questions. I find it hard to dive straight into a topic that interests me, and a question hands me a problem to solve and something to understand. It is the same reason I love a thought experiment. It gives me license to unravel a subject until I feel content, a gift of a question already shaped with such nuance that I get to argue with myself over something that often has no answer. That may be the justification I am always seeking: a general agreement that the topic deserves analysis. If I wasn’t always chasing approval from other’s to explore my thoughts, I might not need questions like these. It has already been agreed upon as worthy by everyone who debated the idea before me, which frees me from the judgment of others and leaves me alone to tinker.

I frequently find myself thinking about the Ship of Theseus. In its original formulation, the paradox asks whether a ship that has had every component replaced, one by one, remains the same ship. When it was first posed to me, I hadn’t dipped a toe into philosophy, so for years I understood it through my hobby of building computers. I got my first prebuilt, a $400 machine, back in 2014, and I have been obsessed with modifying it ever since. I have replaced each part, slowly, one by one, over years and more than once. Five different graphics cards, three motherboards, three cases, and the list goes on. I never changed it all at once. Each swap came when a bottleneck revealed itself and I had a little extra cash from making sandwiches at my first job.

My roughly $3,000 computer is clearly not the one I started with, but when did it stop being that one? After the very last original part was pulled? Once more than half of it was new? There is no correct answer. Still, the hypothetical always resonated with me in its literal, physical sense.

It wasn’t until recently, at 24, that I started trying to educate myself in philosophy, and more recently still that the paradox surfaced again in my head, this time about myself. When I had considered it in that light before, I only had the body in mind, which makes 300 to 400 billion new cells every day. Clearly that doesn’t make me someone entirely new, right? But what if the parts stop being physical? What if time and lived experience begin replacing the pieces of who I was, plank by plank, and the sum of those replacements is who I am?

I have spent my life dissatisfied with who I am. My family set their expectations intentionally high, so high they were unachievable, justified by the notion that if there was always room for improvement, their son would have nowhere to go but up, and they would end up with a son they could be proud of. It was a trade I was unaware I was making, a contract signed in my name before I could read it, and it is far too late to void. Where that leaves me now is pessimistic and eternally dissatisfied, chasing what I foolishly believe is achievable: to be enough.

Every year I look back at who I was the year before, and every year I see a fool. I have always credited this to my desire to improve and chase higher heights, even as I felt nothing but shortfall. I considered it a good trait, and in many ways it is. What I was blind to, with my eyes fixed on the lights above me, was everything I was leaving behind. How can you be someone if you never stay someone?

All my life I have seen only who I could be, never who I am. When I left my hometown in rural Georgia, what excited me most wasn’t Brooklyn itself, the big city with its endless opportunity. It was the chance to start over, to clear my browser history of self. No one here had known me since childhood. I could become a better, newer version of myself and finally be free of the person I so desperately tried to leave behind.

Over a year later, still excruciatingly far from my unachievable goals, I looked back on the year before and admitted that another year of changing who I was had passed. But this year felt different. In years prior, when I turned retrospective, what had changed were my thoughts, hobbies, interests, and understanding of concepts. This year, more had changed than what lived inside my own head. I was no longer in the same small town. My friends were an entirely different set of people than they had been for all the years before. I struggle to remember what the roads look like back in Georgia, and the days between memories grow longer and longer.

I hated who I was back there, and I was finally free. I don’t get homesick, because I was sick of home. The water back there was poisoned with the same chemicals that had been wearing me down all my life, and when I returned for a brief visit, it took only a few sips to remind me why I left. I missed my family, but I didn’t miss living with them. It was a sacrifice I had been willing to make, a trade finally on my terms, and how naïve I was to think I had gotten it right on the first try.

I have a love for logic and understanding. My emotions follow logic, which, unfortunately for some, leaves me not too dissimilar to a robot. The one place I have never managed to align the two is my grandparents.

They raised me with a few non-negotiables. You show people kindness and generosity. You make them laugh. You work hard. I still carry those into every interaction I have, at least the ones outside of games where my bot lane is 1/9.

Growing up, I wanted to be like my grandfather. Everyone liked and admired him, or so it seemed through the children’s telescope I observed him with, a lens too young to understand what it was seeing. As I grew older, my understanding of politics, of the world around me, and of a history that has been unkind to most people grew with me. Perspectives settled into place. Privileges that had always been with me, invisible for their constancy, came into focus once I went looking for answers to the questions I had. “40 acres and a mule” was never just a saying. It was another wound, still left unhealed.

Now I realize that not everyone liked or admired my grandfather. His fellow rich white peers did. The only people of color in his life worked for him and had no choice but to muster words of admiration. History was repeating itself in front of me, proof of how easily inequality goes unnoticed without the historical context to see it.

As my resentment of the evangelical Republican area I grew up in deepened, so did my disdain for the system and for the people who supported it. I would speak up on occasion with my family and explain why I thought the narratives they promoted were harmful and hateful, but all it did was distance me from them. This is where my logic and my emotions stop aligning the way they usually do. Morally, this group of people holds beliefs I would reject from anyone else in my life. Why should blood make them any different?

You might think, from the way I’ve framed this piece, that I don’t love my family. It is unfortunately much more complicated. I am overwhelmingly guilty for loving them. I resent them, and I so desperately want their approval. I go looking for justifications, and I find statistics that quiet my conscience. The one I default to is that the single best predictor of someone’s political alignment is not their race, their gender, or their financial status. It is the political alignment of the people who raised them. I remind myself that my grandparents are far less racist than the people who raised them, and I use that to justify an evening spent with them.

An evening with them meant Family Feud on the TV, where we made fun of the contestants floundering through pitiful answers and seemingly lost common sense. But even with my attempts at justification, I began to resent nights like these as I started to hear the undertones I had once been too naïve to understand. Comments about how if “those” people just worked as hard as they had, they would be as successful. Crime statistics rattled off for them to laugh at from a throne in a sanctuary built by their lineage. As I grew to resent the church, the Republican talking points, and the justifications for bigotry, my guilt over my association with my own family grew right alongside.

Despite all of this, I still went to my grandparents’ house and sat talking with them, eating salsa made from tomatoes and peppers they had grown. They complained that this year’s harvest of peppers was abnormally spicy. They complained about it every year. I think their tolerance for spice was just fading as they aged, but I never cared to tell them. I didn’t want to admit it, because I loved them, and the truth might hurt them.

I carried that unresolved tension for years, and luckily for me, I moved to Brooklyn before I reached any conclusions, unbuckling the restraints the Bible Belt had kept me in for far too long. In my new life, distance from the old one was something I engineered. The resentment I once carried slid from the front of my mind, because the characters most woven into it were no longer around. I never reached a conclusion. I never finished reconciling. Finally under a roof I provided for myself, I didn’t have to appease anyone else’s expectations of me.

What came of that, though unintentional, was clearly inevitable: I forgot who I was in Georgia. What had been the overwhelming majority of my life doesn’t feel, to this day, like it ever happened. I recall my memories like facts from a textbook, with nothing behind my eyes to illustrate them. It feels like I have always been in Brooklyn. Not in the metaphorical, “this is where I am supposed to be” sense, but in a much more abstract sense, a mental distancing from who I was, where I was, and who surrounded me. I hated those parts of my life, and my brain worked overtime to leave them in the past.

I have symptoms of trauma whose root causes I have yet to conclude. My recent development of aphantasia, along with a mental barrier to recalling what should be easy facts about my life in Georgia, leads me to hypothesize that they are tied to that part of my life.

Unfortunately, my escape from reconciliation couldn’t last forever. Last Sunday, October 18th, 2026, my grandparents spent one night in Manhattan before leaving on a cruise for their anniversary. They invited me to dinner. After being so cynical about my own grandparents, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see them. So excited, in fact, that I jumped at the chance to meet them at their hotel hours before the reservation, just to talk and catch up.

When I first saw my grandmother, she stood immediately to hug and greet me. I was embraced in a way that reminded me of something I had long forgotten. I was loved. In the moments before, I had been anxious that they would make fun of the septum piercing I had gotten since they last saw me, and those thoughts melted away, though not for good. Throughout the night I would catch them making eye contact with it instead of me. But I stopped caring, because as the night went on, there wasn’t a single lull in the conversation. We picked up as if I had seen them last week. We talked about all the same things we used to when I saw them most weeks: tennis, food we had made recently, funny stories about our friends, and everything else that came to mind.

What I didn’t expect was that, over the course of the evening, they knew something I no longer did. They knew who I used to be. They told anecdotes about how I used to act, things I used to do, examples of who I was. Sitting in front of them, I could tell they didn’t realize I wasn’t that person anymore. Or maybe I was, and I had simply lost the ability to connect the dots between the grandson they knew and the one sitting across from them.

I have always considered myself reserved to a fault. No one will ever come close to knowing me completely and truly. But maybe I am naïve to think that too, because I was astonished at how effortlessly they held the past up to me like a mirror, without even trying.

When the evening ended and it was time for the hour-and-a-half ride home on the Q train, I said my goodbyes and waved as I turned to walk away. Then I texted my girlfriend:

“we had a great visit, and the food was so good!”

I began my journey home satisfied, with a kind of connection I hadn’t felt in a long time. That contentment didn’t last. Sitting on the train, living inside my own head, I reflected on the evening. Across from me sat a family: a father with his son and daughter. They were joking, bumping into each other to tease, filled with laughter, and breaking from their playful patterns to have small, serious conversations about what was happening in their lives. Before I even knew I was sad, tears began to fill my eyes. Fitting, and a little ironic, that someone who rejects where they came from would earn their official New Yorker card by crying on the subway on a night like this.

I already missed them. It had been less than an hour since I’d left my grandparents, and I couldn’t help feeling that I needed more. The family across from me had no clue that their ordinary evening was carrying me back to times in my life I hadn’t thought about since they stopped occurring. My brain filled with thoughts faster than I could process them. Thoughts of how few visits I have left with my grandparents, only to be replaced by thoughts of who I am. Maybe they didn’t have a complete understanding of me, as it had seemed, but at least they had a cohesive theory. I was nowhere near that.

I found myself guilty again. The physical distance had made it easy not to be intentional about my relationship with them, and let me be lazily, emotionally distant. Meanwhile they were still living by the principles they had taught me, showing me nothing but kindness and generosity. How could I be so selfish as to harbor even an ounce of resentment for people who had shown me this much love at every stage of my life? All these questions slammed against the walls of my skull. Overwhelmed with guilt, with sorrow, and, for the first time in a long time, with the feeling of being seen, I cried.

I rarely cry, normally once or twice a year, which is an improvement on my previous pattern of once every year or two. When I do, it is usually because I am overwhelmed by more emotions than I can logically rationalize and sort into their proper boxes in my head. This was that, fused with a revelation about myself. It wasn’t until a few days of sitting with those emotions that I began to unpack the lessons they were teaching me.

The first lesson was the careful dissection I am responsible for: separating my family’s beliefs from the kind of people they are. My family, just like me, has an abundance of faults. I had let myself fall into the mindset of cancel culture, into the overwhelming sense that it is my job, as someone privileged, to speak up for those less fortunate than me. Because the evangelical think tank had harmed me, I decided it was acceptable to resent everyone involved. It is easier to come to terms with anything when you have a scapegoat. That was the easy way out. I sort my emotions into boxes, and it was only a short step to sorting people into them. It is incredibly selfish to take people who have loved me despite every flaw I have, lump them into a box of the flawed, and leave it in the attic to collect dust.

It is my responsibility to treat everyone with love and kindness. It is my responsibility to understand that it is not okay that my grandfather made a game of trying to hit the Black kids who reset the pins at the bowling alley, instead of aiming for strikes. But I also have to understand that had the environment he grew up in been the one I grew up in, I would bet he would be much different. It is hard to find the line between understanding why my family is the way they are and mistaking that understanding for a valid excuse for hateful behavior. But if I let my political and moral beliefs make me hateful and resentful toward them, despite their showing me nothing but kindness, I would be proving their point about everyone who opposes their beliefs. It is my job to love them despite their flaws: not to make excuses for those flaws, and not to resent them for those flaws either.

The second lesson was that you cannot find yourself if you never stay the same. It doesn’t matter which wooden plank, once replaced, made it no longer Theseus’s ship if the boat never set sail. What use is a boat if all you ever do is repair it and never take it out to enjoy what you’ve built? Who cares if you are changing board after board with no end in sight? It is an ouroboros of self-improvement, pointless if you never get to live a life in the improved state. How can you be someone if you never stay someone?

You might think I have finally concluded that it’s time to slow down and find who I am. Knock off this pointless pursuit of changing who I am, and focusing in on finding who I am. Unfortunately, I already told you. That contract was signed a long time ago, my fingerprint stamped on it in blood, with no expiration in sight. Now at least I know one thing about myself that hasn’t changed. I will always be chasing more. So on to the next year of changing who I am, with a little more to carry than the last, in pursuit of an unachievable version of myself whose heels I have never stopped chasing.