The cells change without asking whether you still feel like the same owner.

You are a process rather than an object. The material replaces itself steadily and nobody consults you about it, and the sense of being the same person persists across all of it, resting on memory and habit rather than on substance. Continuity is a story maintained over changing material, which works well enough until something makes it visible.

This is worth holding when your body changes in ways you did not choose. The self was never anchored in the material as firmly as it feels. What holds you together is more recoverable than what is being replaced.