I talked out loud to myself while walking the dog this evening. I put my earphones in so that folks might think I was on the phone, because I’m (just about) self-aware enough to know that it might look strange to see someone walking around at night, having a full-blown conversation with themselves. I’m not sure if this makes it any more or less strange, but I also clipped a wireless mic to the brim of my cap and recorded the whole thing.
At some point, it struck me how rare this must be, for people to speak out loud to themselves. Even for me, a person who loves spoken word and writes morning pages and introspects a lot, talking out loud to myself isn’t something I’ve done very often. At some point, about 30 minutes into the walk and talk maybe, it started to feel really great. My mind slowed to the pace of my speech, when usually it’s thinking 10 things at once. Instead, I thought one thing and said it out loud.
Much ink has been spilled (ironically) on the great oral traditions of the past, but they usually involved other people. So much self-talk happens on the page, because seeing someone writing alone doesn’t feel unusual, but seeing someone speaking aloud to themselves at your local coffee shop might raise an eyebrow. Same act, different medium—how strange that it’s treated so differently, when a phone call wouldn’t be.
For better or worse, this is now a thing I’m going to become a bit obsessed by for a while. What benefits are there to speaking your thoughts out loud to yourself? Which nerves can you shake by accepting that people are going to think you’re a bit strange once they realize you’re not on the phone? Might you bore yourself, and is that useful? Or perhaps, simply, might it be fun to just try something weird from time to time, for the craic.