The many yous of yourself
In response to Alex's post here (it is neat that we can go back and forth with two independent sites) ... I also find myself using "you" a lot when I'm writing for myself.
My guess as to why this happens is that a person isn't really a static singular self. Of course we know on some level that we all evolve and change through life. But writing is something that accelerates the sharding, forking, splitting, becoming. When I write "you shouldn't check your email when you wake up" (which I did today), it's as if the person who realizes this (me, now) is different from the person from an hour ago who did not. How could that person lack the clarity and values that present me has?! And so the writer, "the I" of the moment, is something like a parental superego that emerges to steer/synchronize the past/future self. The writer is an insight implementation personality.
There's probably also something to "you" being more abstract and generalizable. Even though personal and relatable grounded writing is anchored in "I," the I also acts as a a blinder, only seeing from a limited, narrow vantage point. And so you can levitate above yourself to see the "yous" and "wes" and how this thing you need to internalize is actually a general principle that anyone could ingest. A "you" is more abstractable.
(...I can still recall this moment in my childhood home, maybe at 18 years old, slightly high, where I remembered, deep in the pantry, that I wasn't thinking, but watching myself think. And maybe that dissociative power of weed is what enables/unlocks abstract thinking...)
The irony here is that this inverts traditional advice. If you're writing personal essays with an audience in mind, the tip is "no second person sermons!" (as in, don't use "you" because it's preachy and it infers that you are lecturing and therefore above your audience). I get that. But when I write purely for myself, I find myself using "you" all the time.
If I really am I collection of selves, then shouldn't I write to myself in "we"? Was Smeagol/Gollum onto something? This is the logical extension of my whole theory above, and that makes me question it. It feels wrong. It also points to the Pessoa/Jung divide. Pessoa saw himself as a cabinet of 70 pseudonyms, each with their own personality and literary voice and fictional backstory. Jung's main concept was "individuation" that all the selves should strive to integrate into a single higher Self, a unified personality.
What if I framed it as, "I won't check email in the morning anymore"? Is this preferable? Does framing it in "I" mean that the current you is the same you that sinned not long ago? Does this framing require you to take responsibility? And so is that act of framing the past self as a "you" actually an act of avoiding responsibility? Was Pessoa just a shifty bastard, a brilliant coward to not be emulated?