A Post-Traumatic Paradox

Thought experiments on survival

Every week, I set a theme at the top of my planner pages. For that week, my theme is an anchor I reflect on and aspire to.

This week’s theme is “The Ship of Theseus”. If you haven’t heard the story, Theseus was a mythical king from Athens, who heroically saved the children’s city from King Minos from a brutal Minotaur-related death. He escaped to Delos by boat with all the children in tow. Every year, the people of Athens would take this boat on a pilgrimage to Delos to celebrate his heroism. But as time passed, nature took its toll. One board fell, and then another, and another. The Athenians went by slowly replacing board after board to preserve their precious artifact.

As honorable as that sentiment was, the ancient philosophers of the time took issue with it, as philosophers do.

“If every board on the ship is replaced with a new one,” they wondered, “can we truly say this is the same boat?”

This question inspired thinkers for centuries to come. They mulled over this paradox seriously, writing painstaking defenses and extensive explorations. The thought experiment was meant to inspire deep questioning on the nature of the mind, the self, the constitution of an object, and its parts.

Then there’s me who embodied this paradox gleefully and aspirationally. I’ve spent the week moving my house around, putting my books in new places, reorganizing my work tasks, and trying to get a fresh perspective on my own constancy. I embarked on a mission toward the same exact places I always do, replacing every board of my own life with vigor. By the end of the week, I hope to be in exactly the same place I was but somehow entirely different.

By chance, this month also aligned with the “anniversary” of one of the darkest periods of my life. In the first few years that passed, February often felt sticky and heavy and painful, like somebody pulling your hair and not letting go. I felt mournfully that from this point on, there would always be something difficult stuck to me. I’d grieve over the sense of permanence I felt from being forever changed by a memory.

A few summers ago, I was hit by a flare-up of PTSD that brought back new fragments to unpack. In a state of distress, I called my best friend. She patiently listened to all of the loudness roaring up inside me. She made space for the pain, the anger, the hysterics. And then, she told me the most beautiful and hopeful thing you could ever tell a survivor.

“Did you know that every seven years, your body is made of completely new cells?”

This made me pause. I sniffled, caught in a moment of surprise.

“I know right now this is completely horrible. But there’s gonna be a day when not one piece of you has been touched by that person.”

Now, don’t go philosophizing to me about continued identities and psychological criterions and everything, because I actually really needed that more than she could understand.

That summer, by coincidence or not, evoked a complete regeneration of my entire being. I took my first plane to the city that would become my future home. I read my first psychology book. Wrote my first theory. I mulled over the state of my head that summer, analyzing patterns, trying to understand myself. And the regeneration just grew from there. I moved. I unpacked every facet of my personality and rewrote it all from scratch. I became fascinated with the inner workings of the brain. I designed my first experiment. Some days, it feels like nothing inside of me is what it was four years ago, when I first got on that fated phone call.

I am now six years away from that first mess of a time that changed my life entirely. That anniversary that once marked a parasitical memory which would mark me for life, something new to brace myself for every winter, is now just a fleeting acknowledgment. I usually feel a passing irritation now and again throughout the month that is quickly superseded by the busyness of regular life. But this week’s theme made me pause for a minute longer and reflect on the nature of the body and the self, which are always regrowing themselves as if from scratch. They rarely uproot themselves. They just go slowly dying in bits and pieces, replacing themselves until you look back in shock at how new and strange this vessel you’re in really is. I’ve been almost amused this month by how much can really happen right under your nose.

Next year, I will hit that seven year mark. From a technical standpoint, the sentiment is a bit unscientific - I know. Really my skin cells were brand new a few weeks later. My skeletal muscles could take up to 15 years. My spinal cord will never change. But if there was a time for rough approximations, now would be one. I’ve been excited at the prospect of reaching a new anniversary, a seven year cycle of growth and survival.

Who will I be next year? Which timbers of my ship will have been tossed off and fixed up in some surprising way? Will I be two objects in the same space as some philosophers say? Am I different temporal parts at different times? Does this post-traumatic body have “a multitude of different uses rather than one absolute 'meaning’”, as Hilary Putnam would say? Not quite sure how to answer that. Not quite sure if I truly care. I’ll be truly happy to show up in all of the paradoxes of survival, entirely changed and yet somehow the same