I sit down and write morning pages every day. Occasionally, I’ll run Claude Code against my local Obsidian Vault (where I write my morning pages) to see if it can help me understand the common themes that I’ve been thinking about, or to suggest things that I could write about.
Whilst it’s rarely helpful in a practical sense, I do find myself surprised from time to time by what it gathers of me. The first couple of times I chalked it up to “LLM bad”, and assumed that it had hallucinated some details that weren’t really there. That is, until I checked.
It turns out that I write about things that I completely forget having written about. Sometimes, I write about those things a lot. Sometimes I’ll stop writing about it, only for it to pop up again weeks or months down the line. Who was that person, I wonder, who wrote those things.
I wonder that because… well… that’s how it feels. If I don’t remember writing it, perhaps it’s because I didn’t. Perhaps I’m someone else now, even if temporarily. Perhaps I’m not someone, but many someones. Perhaps I’m all of those someones at once, or just one at a time.
In the western world, we think so much about the self. We are, largely, self-centered (derogatory), and occasionally we’re self-aware, and unfortunately self-conscious. We center the self so frequently, but I’m not sure I could tell you much about myself, because it feels too singular.
Even that word, myself—as if it’s mine, as if there’s one. I heard Elizabeth Gilbert refer to Internal Family Systems (IFS) as “group therapy for one”, and that felt right to me. There’s a group in there, and one, some or all of them might sit down to write morning pages.
There’s been lots written about this, of course, but I’m not trying to parrot back the things I’ve read. I’m trying to actually think about how I feel, regardless of whether there’s prior art or not. Regardless of whether there’s ancient wisdom or not. Just actually sitting with it.
I’ll write more about this later maybe, but a silly Claude Code session served as a visceral reminder today, and I wanted to capture the thought before it slipped away. If you journal on your computer, I recommend running the same experiment and seeing what you learn.