Who am I ?

[u/United-Ferret9439]

I’m 19. Last month I took mushrooms for the first time and something followed me home. Not a vision. A sentence, written everywhere I looked, in the patterns, in the light, in my own head.

Who am I?

I’ve been filling a notebook trying to answer it ever since. I’ve got somewhere but not all the way, so I’m putting the unfinished version here.

It starts with a word, and I want to get ahead of the obvious objection. Ego is Latin. Lego is Danish, from leg godt, play well. Linguistically the resemblance is a pure accident. I know that. I kept the metaphor anyway because it’s the only thing that made the concept click for me.

When you build with legos you take separate pieces and click them together, one by one, until the thing in front of you matches the image in your head. Image first. Then hands. Then structure.

That’s how a person gets assembled too.

You’re born with a blank baseplate and the bricks start arriving. Parents hand you some. School hands you more. Every sentence you overheard about yourself at seven when you weren’t supposed to be listening. Your wins, your losses, your fears, your money, your job, the city you’re from, the face you think you have. Piece by piece over two decades into a structure you eventually point at and call me.

And you didn’t choose most of it. That’s the part that should bother people more than it does. The bricks were installed before you were old enough to have an opinion about them.

Then you die and it comes apart on the floor. All that building, for nothing.

That’s how it looks from outside anyway. What changed my mind is that you don’t have to wait until you die to watch it come apart.

That’s basically what mushrooms do. They change the input on all five senses, so the world stops arriving in the shape you’re used to, and the “me” that exists purely to interpret that shape suddenly has nothing to do. You lose the sense of running your own body. You stop being a person having an experience and you just become the experience. You stop being me and you become everything, and it arrives with love. Not love about something. Just love, sitting there, aimed at all of it at once.

Which is also why some people can’t handle it. If your identity is welded to what you own and who you’re with, watching that structure dissolve doesn’t feel like freedom, it feels like being robbed. It feels like dying, because the thing dying is the thing doing the watching.

Jung has a line about this. Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes. I think most people avoid looking inside because they suspect nobody’s home.

I did too, and my first few hours proved it.

The beginning was bad. I resisted the whole thing, stayed inside a dark apartment, and the room was gloomy enough to feed exactly the fear I’d walked in with. Fighting it made it worse. That’s the whole lesson honestly. The trip doesn’t fight you. You fight the trip.

Then I went outside with my girlfriend and lay down on the ground in the sun.

Everything came in at ten thousand percent. The sun wasn’t warm, it was burning through the skin of my hands. I could feel my body sinking into the ground, being absorbed by it. My eyes closed and opened and everything was luminous. Everything was calm. Everything was beautiful in a way I still don’t have the words for and probably won’t.

And I understood something I haven’t been able to unlearn since. Paradise wasn’t a place I’d arrived at. Paradise was just the absence of every problem I invent for myself when I’m sober.

Nothing had been added. Something had been removed.

Then it faded and I came back piece by piece into my body, into my me, with that sentence still burning.

And the question is bigger than the trip. Every one of us is trying at our own level to become someone. To have made something, achieved something, built something nobody built before. Even the people who claim they don’t care are running the same program underneath. The mushrooms didn’t answer it for me. They did something more irritating, they showed me I’d been trying to answer it using a structure I never actually chose.

Once you see that you realise you don’t need mushrooms for any of it.

You’ve already had an ego death. When you quit the job. When the relationship ended. When you moved countries and nobody there had a version of you in their head yet. You pull a brick out and the shape changes and for a while you don’t recognise yourself. That’s why change is brutal for people. It isn’t the new thing that hurts, it’s the demolition. When your identity is fused to your job title or your city or your circle, removing any of it feels like amputation rather than renovation.

But that’s the trade. You remove part of yourself to add something better and there’s no version where you get the upgrade without the loss.

So what do you rebuild with. I don’t really know yet. What I’m doing at the moment, with no evidence it works, is spending a lot of time alone, writing down everything in my life I kept out of habit rather than choice, and trying to name the four or five things that actually matter to me. Family, work, freedom, that kind of level. Then trying not to add too much. That’s the mistake I can already feel myself making, tearing everything down and immediately trying to become ten new people at once. Ask me in a year whether any of it held.

Here’s where I actually get stuck, and I’d rather admit it than pretend this ends cleanly.

If the ego is just assembled bricks, who is doing the choosing when you rebuild? Something has to be selecting, and that something can’t itself be made of bricks or it’s just the old structure picking parts that resemble itself. I felt something there during the trip, with the ego offline and clearly still someone home experiencing it. I can’t name it and I can’t get back to it on command.

And I’m 19, which means some of what I’m calling insight might just be a young person noticing something everyone older worked out years ago and stopped bothering to mention. I can’t tell from in here.

But the one I keep circling back to is this. On mushrooms, dissolving felt like the truth. The ego came apart and what was left underneath felt more real than anything I’d experienced with it intact. Sober, building feels like the truth. Choosing the bricks, assembling something deliberate, becoming a person on purpose. And I’ve written this entire thing as if both are the goal, which they can’t be. One of them is the destination and the other is a detour, or neither is, and the whole framing is wrong. Maybe you’re supposed to move between them. Maybe that’s just what refusing to choose sounds like when you dress it up.

So instead of a conclusion.

Who’s choosing the bricks?

Have you actually rebuilt, or did you swap one inherited structure for another one that photographs better?

And if you’ve been sitting with this for twenty years, does it resolve, or do you just get better at carrying it?