“I needed time to get used to my new self. What kind of a being was this self of mine? How did it function? What did it feel—and how? I had to grasp each of these things through experience, to memorize and stockpile them. Do you see what I am saying? Virtually everything inside me had spilled out and been lost. At the same time that I was entirely new, I was almost entirely empty. I had to fill in that blank, little by little. One by one, with my own hands, I had to make this thing I called ‘I’—or, rather, make the things that constituted me.”