What makes you “you”?

Is it the brain you have? The body too? Or maybe it’s something vaguer than that, like a collection of childhood memories: watching pills bug roll into a ball in your fist, failed lemonade stands, grass-chafed knees and sandwich crusts pushed to the side of the paper plate.

If someone pointed at the 6-year-old immortalized above the piano or fireplace, that’s you, isn’t it?

“Yeah that’s me,” you’d say, without really remembering who that kid was, and mom probably remembers that version of you better than present version you ever will. If you thought about it more, you’d might respond different

“That was me,” you tell yourself. “But not anymore.”

There’s 10-year-old you, school uniform tucked perfectly above the belly button. Math > Grammar, but Books > Talking to Strangers. 0% me, I hope. At 12 you were like “wait wtf was wrong with me you weren’t cool at all then” (just kidding, didn’t think that for another 10 years).

Then there’s 18-year-old you, that strange, catch-22 time of thinking every little mistake is the end of the world but absolutely needing to fail to learn about oneself. At 22 you’re still maybe 22% that version, give or take a few ticks.

You remember what you did pretty well last year, right? Snagged a degree, senior springed a bit, caught up with the high school friends a few times. Only four of those, and it’s back to a version of you that’s 78% definitely, thank god, not you.

But it is still you—a continuously existing person micro-dosing on amnesia, still as blind right now about age 23 as you were about age 7 when you were 6. At least you know better than that foolish last-year-you.

You aren’t a brain, a body, or even a memory, but a book. The story continues, and you may even flip back a few pages to cross something out or write in the margin every once in awhile. Life events are chapters, graduations section headers, turning points are…turning points.

In the end, you are the one writing the story, and not just to tell your kids or your grandkids. There’s generations within one novel—at age 15, you remember age 10, and at 20, you remember 15, but 10 is a little hazy. From what my mom likes to tell me, 35 when I’m 45 won’t be any easier.

Even as I try to maintain the connection between grandfather to grandson and Korea to the U.S., there’s a personal connection to maintain.

There’s a old Korean saying: “The frog forgets its troubles as a tadpole.”

Or, for memory’s sake—“The Gyrados forgets about its days splashing around as a Magikarp.”

It’s important to always remember what turned me into me.