When none of the usual people are around to have a conversation with, ‘private speech’ can be helpful as well as fun
Camille remembers the first time she noticed talking to herself out loud. “It was almost like, ‘Oh, that’s my voice’, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought of it if I’d been speaking in a meeting. I was usually reporting on what I was doing. I might say, ‘Go on, take an onion; take an onion and chop it up.’ I think it reminded me of certain kinds of play.”
For all that the pandemic has taken from us, it may have helped us to become more aware of some aspects of our everyday mental processes, like the fact that many of us talk to ourselves, out loud as well as silently in our heads, for much of the time. Many of us will have spent more time alone in the past 16 months than ever before. In the case of my friend Camille, the awareness sprang from deep isolation: her partner was stuck in a foreign country and she was living alone with little contact apart from Zoom meetings.
