“It is always generating images or words.” If we are always in conversation with ourselves, why don’t we all talk out loud? The answer, says Mari-Beffa, is down to the two sides of the brain: one that is chaotic and random and one that is orderly and in control. “The brain is always active,” says Mari-Beffa. Words, sounds and images just appear from nowhere, then dissolve into nothingness like a shooting star there and then gone.
Come to think of it, when I have paid attention to my resting thoughts I realise that I can’t claim authorship over any of them. She says that most of us talk to ourselves, silently, all the time – “and by ‘all the time’ I mean even when you sleep”, she says. Do I need help? Not particularly, says Paloma Mari-Beffa, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Bangor. The problem with this is I know everything about me me got boring fast, so I began to argue with me.
I have always talked to myself, usually only a few words of encouragement as I rise in the morning, or when I’m trying to navigate through a dense brain fog, but in lockdown the only person I was guaranteed to speak to every day was me. I was isolated and lonely, with only myself for company. I moved to another part of London, with new people, and had to start the process of resocialisation all over again. My landlord, who had packed 13 tenants into a family home, lost his Houses in Multiple Occupation licence and we all had to find new digs. Then I got evicted from my flat in east London. By the end of the month, I was on first-name terms with the local shopkeeper I had avoided even eye contact with for more than a year the barber’s was no longer a place I went to have silent staring matches with my reflection and I even learned some of the names of my flatmates. After overcoming my initial shyness, I opened my gob and started chatting. Crippling social anxiety, introversion and sloth had kept me in a depressing bubble of loneliness and self-imposed exclusion I wondered whether random chats with people might burst that bubble and open up a new world of social discovery. At the start of 2020, I embarked on a month-long quest to find meaningful conversations with strangers.
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