Maybe selfhood is a rough-cut hunk of crystal

An interesting question: who are we, devoid of context or of consciousness? My first impulse is to assert that you are still you, just half-shrouded in sleep or confusion, only half-slipped into your niche in the world. But then imagine the situation extended, that you hang in stasis. Long enough for your niche to change. Do you lose yourself in the dark? At what point? Is my selfhood delimited by time, does it have a half-life? If “I” am defined by my consciousness, for how long must my consciousness be transformed before the core of that “I” changes with it? What is my true nature: is it the vague outline of who I have been for the longest, of who I have been at my most aware, or simply of who I am now? If it is the latter, does my selfhood flicker like a flame in the wind? Or am “I” defined not by my character at all, but by my memories?

I am in many ways a skeptic, I believe we are our bodies, I question the existence of a soul. If our personalities can be uprooted by small shifts in our neurochemistry, what claim can we make toward intrinsic constancy?

To me, all of the above bear the heft of truth, aside from the idea that our essence changes with the breeze; our pasts are too elemental. Maybe selfhood is a rough-cut hunk of crystal, refracting reality in countless different ways. Maybe it’s​ foolish to attach ourselves too strongly to any one angle. It seems to me there are two ways to approach this thought: that it is sad to be so fragile, or that it is beautiful to be so amorphous. To exist as a changing arrangement on some cosmic canvas. To think that you can never be lost: on the ageless scale of the universe, no energy is drained or gained.