#allowing

On accepting it:

Yes, we do have fears and anxieties about being remade sometimes. We get attached to ourselves, we want to keep ourselves the same, we want to feel like we know something about who we are, we envy the casual nature of other people's identity persistence. Sometimes we choose to fight it and hold still a little while longer.

Slowly, it's gotten easier to let go and trust that we'll be okay on the other side of it. More cycles passing makes the process more mundane to us. It's neither good nor bad, just a thing that happens sometimes.

We do have the comfort of there being a little continuity to the discontinuity of it all. When we're recycled, the person that emerges has access to old memories and information. They're not starting from a total blank slate. Their sense of identity is often significantly different from who they used to be, but there's the sense of a shared thread of self. We can reconnect with the thread of who we used to be if we put in a little effort, and it tends to be helpful in tying up loose ends. I am bound to who I used to be by memory and feelings, in the end, even if I was someone else when those memories were made.

Approaching the whole cycle from the lens of a sort of quasi-ancestor worship practice has helped find some comfort in it. We choose to honor who we used to be and what they gave to create us as we are, and it's a comfort to know that someday, someone else will remember us too. It creates more continuity in the chaos. (And the result is a life where we're kinder to ourselves regardless.)

Being fully fused for two years also helped a lot. It's certainly one way to get over the "a change has occurred and I am not the same person I was" fear- all or almost all of us know what it feels like to let go of a concrete identity and still exist. There's a lesson you learn of "I do not have to be the same Person to exist- I am here regardless of what face I wear, what you call me, what I think or want or fear. I am the only thing that I cannot lose."

That, and having a few possession experiences helps more than you'd think. What is the self if others can move in and out of it? Does it really matter who you are exactly if you're here? (Sometimes it does matter. Sometimes it doesn't.)

I think the biggest help, though: the idea that suffering comes from fighting, avoiding, straining to grasp/cling to, or resisting something. Change is painful if we refuse to let it happen (or chase after changes before their time). When we relax into the fear and allow ourselves to become someone new, it's not scary. It's often a relief. Allowing is a skill, and it's an incredibly useful one in a lot of ways.

There are a few comics and writing pieces that helped us with this too. I'm going to recommend most of the ones I can remember.

Annotated reading list:

This comic shaped how we handle change and self-replacement in a lot of ways (including the above self-ancestor worship angle). Content warning for suicide, death, "what makes a continuous person?" questioning, and similar. It's heavy and existentially challenging to think through, but it's useful. (We'd recommend journaling on your feelings about it if you can. Debating and discussing with ourselves about this comic opened a lot of doors.)

Partial screenshots of the most important bits (the full comic is longer):

In short: it helped us see and accept the idea that our past, present, and future selves are different people regardless of whether we change our identities, opinions, experiences, etc. We are plural in serial, not just parallel. What's one more change when me-yesterday is already someone different from me-today? Why fear change when it's already happened a million times over?

For a much shorter comic on the same ideas, see also:

Outside of comics, Opening the Door is a piece that helped us. If you can read through the metaphors/mad rambling/lightly plagarized nature of it and slowly deconstruct the thing into its lessons (or dig through its creator's website to learn the references- a starting point for you that has topical relevance), then there are a lot of useful ideas in here. It's just a challenging read the first few times (and a rare case of "this is easier to understand the more insane you are"). Take notes and reflect in the margins or a notebook as you go. It helps.

Don't worry too much about Round 10. It's confused just about everyone we know, us included. There's something there, but you can get the idea from the rest of the text without understanding what the hell Round 10 is on about.

The essential things we learned from it that are relevant here:

Your self isn't the same thing as your identity, and it's also not the same thing as (your soul, the higher self, wise mind, the continuous thread of youness if you believe that exists). The identity can change or die without killing the self or soul. Oftentimes, it has to die to escape its own self-destruction. Being remade is a rare chance to start again in a better position than where you were stuck before.

Tools are most useful when you don't let them control you. If you have a hammer, then learn when you need to go find a screwdriver instead of bashing screws into the wall because you use the hammer for everything.

Identity is a tool. If it doesn't work, try something else. If it's time to let it go, then let it go.

Using a screwdriver to bash nails into the wall because you want to avoid using a hammer for everything isn't much better than using the hammer for everything. Rejection is a different kind of clinging.

Some concepts can't be understood without changing the frame you're looking at them from. Get a different viewpoint, and you might find a more useful understanding.

Footnotes: