I don't remember the first time I saw my reflection. But I do remember one of the times after, when I was about 3 years old. I was alone in my room and I stared in the mirror. I wondered what purpose I'm here for. For some reason, I assumed that I must be here because I'm the consequential human. I was going to be the next Albert Einstein or something. I probably didn't know who Albert Einstein was but I thought I was gonna be something like that.

As I aged, I came to the realization that I would not be the smartest person in the world, nor the most important to the world. So who am I?

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It's often said that you can't see yourself. Photos are two-dimensional reproductions, your image in the mirror is flipped. But even if you were to have a perfect one-to-one recreation that you can view, that wouldn't be you, just a recreation. But are we not our arms, our torsos, our legs and our toes? Are they not us just as our face is?

Our faces act as representations of us because they express, to the greatest extent in our bodies, what we are feeling. But they are not *more* “us” than, say, our calves. One could argue that they are just as much “us” as our reflections.

The extent to which one's physicality and identity overlap is a philosophical question called the “mind–body problem”. Some people think that the body and the mind are separate; some think that they are the same thing. Like all good philosophy questions, to develop an educated opinion on this would take a lifetime of scholarship, which I don't particularly care for. But like, I do know that when we take drugs, like antidepressants, they involuntarily change our mental states, so the two can't be completely separate. I also know that if I cut off my arm, I would (probably) feel like I remain the same person — like, our experience would continue to be continuous, so the mind cannot be completely reliant on the exact state of the body.

I'd also say that if we can collectively think of two different concepts and understand the differences, there's a good chance that they're two different concepts. And what is a thing but a concept? We hear a lot of talk about social constructs — like, race is made up by society, and yet it still is real because we conceptualize it and act on that conception.

So can we see ourselves? We can see most of our physicality, just not like our face. Unless we were seriously deformed. But can we see our minds? To that, I answer: do we not already?

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When I saw myself in the mirror, I was presented with the image of things I would consider objects, not subjects. This is the consequence of Lacan's idea of the mirror stage.

My therapist told me in our last appointment that my “homework assignment”, as she put it, was to figure out more about who I am. Somehow, at 20, I don't know much about myself. I mean, I know I have blond hair, pale skin, a penis, four limbs, blue eyes, all that. But what do I like? What brings me happiness? Honestly, I thought my therapist would give me the answers to all that. But I must come to the answers myself, to develop healthy cognitive habits. Unfortunately to her, I am a very difficult case, because I am not fucking getting it.

But it's because my superego is imposed on my ego — I don't separate who I want to be from who I am. Why don't I want to realize who I am? I guess I have a fear of recognizing my inadequacy with respect to my standards. I don't give myself enough forgiveness, and so I cannot recognize who I am.

Well what do I like? Well I like the color red. Or do I? I remember coming to that arbitrary decision when I was little, and I stuck with it in my response to the question of my favorite color. And I chose that because I was watching the Nickelodeon show “Olivia” where the titular character Olivia's favorite color is red, and I wanted to be like that fucking pig Olivia. So it had nothing to do with my favorite sensorially. It wasn't my favorite sensorially back then, which was the question I was trying to answer, and it's probably not my favorite sensorially now. But if I try to think about what I actually like now, I find that whatever color reminds me of the image I want to be is what I like the most. So those two questions cannot be separated.

But I'm more than just who I want to be. Right? There are parts of me that I hate about myself and would never want to be. Are the things that I would never want to be actually chosen by me? Or are they chosen by other people? Or are they chosen by my mind about what other people want me to be? Do I just consider the people I like — the people who I want to be?

Is “what I want to be” just a survival response to calculate what will make me do the best in social situations — and “who I am” just the creation of a self on top of that?

All of our thoughts and feelings are just consequences of our base desires and our understanding on how to maximally achieve them. How are we different from large language models? How are we different from logic learning machines?

Are pain and pleasure just corrections of this understanding of how to maximally achieve our base desires?

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