This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I discovered a pile of sleep shirts that I’d forgotten to put away last night after I finished folding my laundry. Absently, barely dressed and still damp from my morning shower, I split the shirts into stacks that would fit in my dresser and moved to tuck them away when I noticed that the shirts I’d split the stack at both probably needed to be thrown out (because the armpit holes had become visible while the shirts were folded). One was a shirt I’ve known for a while I’d need to throw away but have resisted doing so because I really like the graphic on it and there’s no replacing it. The other one was a shirt I’d gotten some years prior, after doing a canoe-marathon-fundraiser event with my father for an organization that maintained a large stretch of the Des Plaines river in Illinois. As I thought about throwing it away, I realized that I would be disposing of a connection to my parents and replacing it with some other shirt that is too stained or holey for regular wear. That thought spiraled out and I realized that, like the proverbial full refreshing of your body via cellular replacement every seven years and the Ship of Theseus that leant it’s name to the paradox, it would not be long before all the connections I had to my parents would be gone. Perhaps this thought was circling my subconscious already since I made myself a big meal the night before using a recipe I’d inherited from my mother, but I’ve thought about little else since it came to mind this morning.

It has been two and a half years since the last time I spoke to my parents, during the disastrous but closure-providing family therapy sessions I did with my sister and my parents. It has been five and a half years since I last saw them, or my childhood home, in person. It has been six and a half years since I decided to distance myself from my family. It has been over seven years since I last received any kind of financial assistance from them. It has been eleven and a half years since I last hoped they would show up to help me. It has been just over fifteen years since I last thought of the house I was raised in as a home. There is little remaining to connect me to that part of my past. The two siblings I talk to and the scars we all carry. An email of recipes. Unexamined boxes of childhood books, toys, and the various materials of youth. Scattered letters and emails documenting the broken, often-ruinous communication between my parents and I following my expressed wish for a period of silence. A lingering desire for something no one could ever give me that grows weaker with time and the slow decay of these severed connections. Half-rotten planks in non-structural locations that don’t need me to replace them in order to keep this ship sailing.

Today, as all this swirls through my mind, I find myself wondering what it means to be a ship of theseus as a person. I am not the person who followed my parents instructions to remain silent long after they had any means of enforcing such commands, but will there always be a part of me that was that person? Even if the 7-year cellular replacement thing is true and real, the marks of past wounds don’t entirely disappear. The cells making up the scars might be different, but the marks remain, which is not true of the ship of theseus. Any scarred or broken pieces of that boat are replaced in their entirety but there’s no way to completely remove such marks on a human body, much less on the human psyche. While the slow cycles of degredation and renewal might cycle most of the material connections to my parents out of my life in due time, will I ever feel like I am actually disconnected from them, or will I always remain the ship that sailed this particular course despite my best efforts to become something, someone, else?

I’ve written before that I think of myself as no longer having parents. I’ve even written about how that creates a lot of complicated feelings because I will have an asterisk next to that thought for years and years to come, despite my desire to make a clean cut. Despite all this framing and effort meant to make peace with my decisions and with the state of my life, I will never not have had parents. I will never not have had MY parents. I will always be the ship that survived that horrible, eighteen-year journey and the difficult process of rebuilding that has taken me almost as long. My shirts might wear out and I might finally decide there’s no benefit to holding on to the messages passed back and forth between my parents and I when they proved they still didn’t respect me enough to listen to me, but I will never not have gone through that ordeal. Perhaps the ship of theseus itself is the wrong metaphor to apply here, despite how aptly it fits to some parts of my life. Perhaps I am Sisyphus and they are my boulder. Perhaps I am Prometheus and they are the eagles eating my newly regenerated liver every day. Perhaps I should not reduce my experience to a metaphor. Perhaps I can’t reduce it to a metaphor.

There is little consolation to be had in letting this spiral consume my thoughts for a day. I’m not even sure there’s anything productive in it, since I’m largely just outlining my thinking here and not coming to any new or useful conclusions. I already knew that none of these metaphors would work. I already knew that I’d never be able to remove all connections to my parents. I already knew that I would spend my life grieving what might have been, the same way I grieve the loss of anything or anyone that meant something to me. Sometimes, though, I can’t help but look for ways around it. I don’t want my life to be shaped by all of this. I want to be comeone free of it. I want the ship of theseus paradox to apply to me. I want to be able to, over enough time, entirely remake myself such that no part of me was touched by all that pain and disappointment. I spent so much of my life wishing I could somehow undo what was done or make it never have happened and now, after doing the hard work of getting past that feeling, I find myself wishing I could make it no longer matter to me, to excise all of the impact it had. A new flavor of the same thing, unfortunately. At least I’ll have something to talk to my therapist about when I see her next.