You have changed. Not in the vague sense that everyone changes, but in the more specific sense that you no longer hold certain beliefs, want certain things, or perhaps even recognize the person who made some of your biggest choices. The question is what you owe that earlier self. Whether you are obligated to honor commitments they made. Whether you can simply move on, or whether moving on requires something from you first.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster have each thought about what the self owes to its own history.
Wittgenstein: the earlier self spoke a different language
Ludwig Wittgenstein understood his own intellectual life as a series of breaks, not developments. His early work and his late work contradict each other in fundamental ways, and he did not try to reconcile them. His view was that the problems the earlier Wittgenstein had been solving were, in a sense, not real problems but confusions produced by misunderstanding the nature of language. The later work was not a revision of the earlier. It was a departure.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Wittgenstein's approach suggests something useful: the person you used to be was not wrong so much as they were working with a different set of concepts, asking questions from within a different framework. You do not owe that person loyalty to conclusions they reached from within that framework. But you might owe them the acknowledgment that the framework was real, that it made sense from inside, and that the fact of having changed does not make what they did or believed worthless.
Hurston: you carried the earlier self here
Zora Neale Hurston wrote with particular intensity about the relationship between where you came from and who you are now. She refused both pure nostalgia and pure severance. The person you were shaped the person you became, even when you moved in directions the earlier self could not have imagined. That shaping is not something you can or should erase.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Hurston would push back on the idea that growth means leaving the earlier self behind entirely. She would say that some of what you are now, some of what you value and how you see, came from that earlier version, and that dismissing it too quickly is a form of ingratitude toward the very process that made you who you are. The question is not whether to honor the earlier self, but how to carry what was real about them without being trapped by what was not.
Aristotle: you are a continuous project
Aristotle understood human beings as beings oriented toward a telos, an end or purpose that gives shape to a life understood as a whole. Character, for Aristotle, is not a fixed possession but a set of dispositions developed over time through habit and choice. The earlier choices matter not because they bind you forever, but because they are part of the continuous project of becoming who you are.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle would say that you owe the earlier self something, but not unlimited allegiance to what they decided. What you owe is an honest accounting of whether the changes you are making represent genuine growth, an improvement in the quality of your character and your choices, or whether they represent a convenient exit from something difficult. Growth and avoidance can look similar from the outside. The question is which one you are actually doing.
Where they pull in different directions
Wittgenstein would say: the earlier self was working with a different framework. You are not betraying them by leaving the framework. You may be doing what they were trying to do, more clearly.
Hurston would say: the earlier self is not separate from you. They carried you here. Do not be so quick to disown them.
Aristotle would say: what matters is whether the change represents improvement. If it does, it honors the earlier self. If it is avoidance dressed as growth, it does not.
The question to sit with
You probably owe the person you used to be some honest acknowledgment, not reverence, but recognition that they existed, that they made sense from inside the life they were living, and that dismissing them entirely would mean dismissing the process that produced who you are now.
What you do not owe them is permanent fidelity to choices they made before you knew what you know now.