"IDK" is text-speak for a shrug, three letters typed without effort. The poem spends the rest of its length showing how much weight that shrug can carry. Its subject is the loss of identity, and its central idea is that a self can be worn away by a thousand small adjustments to please other people, with no single dramatic event needed.
The opening sets up the problem through grammar. "I am told / Told who I am and must be." The speaker is the object of the sentence, and the stuttering repeat of "Told" makes the instruction sound relentless. The next stanza stacks up "How I must dress, / How I must act and / How I must behave," and the repeated "How I must" lines pile up like a list of house rules. There is an irony here. The speaker claims not to know who they are, yet everyone else seems to know exactly who they should be.
The imagery gives the poem its shape. Dreams are not abandoned but misplaced: "I do not even know what they are anymore / Or where they have gone," as if they wandered off while the speaker wasn't looking. What remains is "blackness." Then the poem moves to water. Being "lost in this school of fish" suggests a crowd that moves as one with no individuals in it, and the word "school" may carry a second meaning, though that is only an inference from the text. The ocean is "big, but... empty," yet also "far more complicated," which is a puzzling pairing until you read it as freedom with no direction. There is plenty of space and nothing to steer by. The "currents" are the best image in the poem because they are invisible. They push without announcing themselves, and the list that follows ("Family, friends and peers, work mates and partners") widens until no part of life is left untouched. The flat sentence "And I change for each and every one" is more unsettling than a complaint would be, because it sounds like routine.
The four questions that follow work as a roll call of selves: the obedient one, the risk taker, the hard worker, the one who puts "you first over myself." Each belongs to a different audience, and some contradict each other, since an obedient person and a risk taker rarely live in the same body. The labels are also flattering ("holds so dear," "have come to know"), which is part of the trap, because praise keeps the performance going. Look at the last question, too. The speaker slips into "you," and the sentence ends on "myself" as an afterthought. The grammar acts out the self-erasure the poem describes. The stark single line "I do not know anymore" then answers all four questions at once.
The form is plain free verse. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the stanzas vary in length. The refusal of rhyme matters, because a neat chime would suggest a resolution the poem doesn't have. Phrases return like bad habits: "I do not know" opens and closes the poem's central movement, and "more then I could handle" appears twice in the final stanzas, going round on itself. The occasional slips in spelling and grammar ("uses" for "used," "then" for "than") add to an unpolished, written-in-the-moment feel, which suits the subject.
The ending moves from water to earth. "I uses to know what I wanted / But a chore it became" turns desire into labour, and the inverted word order adds to the sense of something going wrong. The ocean gives way to "a hole," and the poem finishes on "amnesia," a clinical word that makes the loss sound like an injury. It is a striking final metaphor because the self is not stolen or destroyed here. It is simply forgotten.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty. It offers no cure, villain or lesson, and it is brave enough to leave the speaker where they are. Many readers will recognise the feeling of acting differently with every group and then struggling to say which version was real. The signature "mouse" and the casual title "IDK" suggest something small and offhand. That may be an inference, but it fits the poem's quiet, unshowy voice, which makes the confusion feel ordinary and so more believable.