I have come across thoughts similar to mine regarding personal identity in two quite dissimilar books, the novel A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929), and the philosophical essay System of Transcendental Idealism by F. W. J. Schelling (1800).
First, here are some passages from my books expressing the thought:
From God is a Symbol of Something True: “It is simply an irreducible fact that I am the person who I am, that you are you, that everyone else is whoever he or she is, and that each of us is unique. It can’t be explained or analyzed in terms of some more basic fact or set of facts.” (p. 120)
From Dreams and Resurrection: “The first-person perspective, the fact that, out of all the people in the world, one is just this person and no other, is simply given to each one of us. Without it, no analysis of what personal identity consists in will enable us to understand what makes a particular person the one he or she is.” (p. 120)
From Psychedelic Christianity: “What can be seen is the outside. What can’t be seen is the inside. But the inside is experienced, directly, by each one of us. Psychedelic Christianity is based on the empirical principle: try it and find out for yourself. It is a distortion of empiricism to think of it as belief in only what can be confirmed by what appears to the senses, or else we must expand our concept of ‘the senses.’ If I feel joy, for example, is that something I know through sense experience? Out of all the people I know about, I know which one I am. Is that something I know through sense experience? Whose sense experience?” (p. 60)
And here is the passage from A High Wind in Jamaica: “She had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows, behind the windlass (on which she had hung a devil’s-claw as a door-knocker); and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she. . . .
Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was now Emily Bas-Thornton (why she inserted the ‘now’ she did not know, for she certainly imagined no transmigrational nonsense of having been any one else before), she began seriously to reckon its implications.
First, what agency had so ordered it that out of all the people in the world who she might have been, she was this particular one, this Emily; born in such-and-such a year out of all the years in Time, and encased in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh? Had she chosen herself, or had God done it?” (p. 84)
From System of Transcendental Idealism: “That I am limited as such follows directly from the self’s unending tendency to become an object to itself; limitation as such is therefore explicable, but it leaves the determinacy entirely free, even though both arise through one and the same act. Both taken together, that the determinate limitation cannot be determined through limitation as such, and yet that it arises along with the latter, simultaneously and through one act, means that it is one thing that philosophy can neither conceive nor explain. As surely, indeed, as I am limited as such, I must be so determinately, and this determinacy must reach into the infinite, for this infinitely outreaching determinacy constitutes my entire individuality; it is not, therefore, the fact that I am determinately limited which cannot be explained, but rather the manner of this limitation itself. For example, it can certainly be deduced in general that I belong to a determinate order of intelligences, but not that I belong to precisely this order; that I occupy a determinate position in this order, but not that it is precisely this one.” (p. 59)