I don't know how to express or articulate my thoughts and my vocabulary and grammar gets messed up the more I write so I will just write simply.
What I'm trying to say is that every day or hour or minute or everytime you think, you feels like your original selves is dying. I know that we are constantly growing but i just can't stop thinking that whenever we grow or learning new things or start to think differently, our past selves is dead. I think back to my past selves in middle school, highschool and from 2022 and think, aren't they dead? No matter what i do or think or whatever happens to me, i can't bring back the personalities or "me"s from the past. They remain dead and continue to being dead. Unless they are exist in another timeline or universe.
What exactly is identity, consciousness or the self which is me? I don't know nor understand but this idea just stuck in my mind and occasionally appears when I'm bored, stressed or relaxed.
You've probably hit upon a good metaphor for what's happening.
I believe each time we sleep parts of our personalities are torn down and rebuilt slightly differently.
Whatever the mechanism, you aren't really the same person you were years ago, you're a different person with many of the same memories. The "self" is a useful simplification of reality. At the fundamental level, its not possible to define "you" and "not you" at a moment in time, much less across spans of time.