After I Talked To Myself Out Loud, People Didn’t Walk Away. But…
Have you ever talked to yourself, out loud, in public? During the eight years that I spent in Hong Kong, I have seen too many talking to themselves alone loudly on the street or inside a train. I found the same after I moved to New York City. But for most of the time, I didn’t capture other people’s reaction, especially the nuances on one’s face.
So I decided to play the role myself on the 7 Train for a week on my way back home from school. Surprisingly, no one yelled at me. No one walked away. But still, they reacted in their subtle ways.
For five days, I spoke to myself about random things, on and off. Sometimes my voice went up, and sometimes I mumbled. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese. And I kept changing my approach.
On Day 1 and 2, I was simply talking about mundane and random things just like doing self-reflection, only with a louder voice. On Day 3 and 4, I started to swear and make comments about my day. On Day 5, I acted as if I were talking to the air and having a dialogue with someone who didn’t exist.
Nothing physically intense happened throughout the days. Maybe I should have been more aggressive. But it was interesting to notice the details on people’s faces following my action. For the first two days, as soon as I started talking, I could feel all eyes on me, but then people went back to their businesses quickly. But there was one woman who kept looking at me. We didn’t have any eye contact, but I knew she looked at me for 16 times, on and off, before she left the train at Jackson Heights station.
On Day 3, after Court Square station, two people left the seats and I sat down. “I was fucking wrong. It was a fucking bad idea,” I said, while a man walked inside the train. He heard me and hesitated for two seconds and sat down next to me. “It was not cool. He started all this. But I cleaned up the mess,” I continued. Then I paused for a minute before starting cursing in Cantonese.
I kept on for another two minutes and finally the man next to me turned right his head and looked at me for a second. He then slightly moved his body to his left and took out his earphone. Just right after he put them up, he had an eye contact with the man sitting opposite to me. Nothing was said, but there was a slight shrug.
An interaction didn’t come until the last day after I sat down next to a young man. I noticed there was another empty seat on the opposite side. So I turned to a direction where nobody was standing and said, “Come on. There is a seat. Sit down.” The man next to me looked around and quickly turned back to his iPhone. I knew it was working.
So I continued, “Why don’t you sit down? You have a pain in your ass or what? You have been standing for a day. Sit the goddamn down.” And the next station, a woman walked in and took the seat. I irritated and said, “That’s great now. You keep standing. Keep standing. I’m not giving my seat to you.” The train was approaching the last station at Flushing, and nobody was standing on that train. When I was done, the train went complete silence.
Right after people stood up to get off, I talked to the man next to me, “Do you think I’m a genius?” The man frowned with a face of confusion. He sneered and left while shaking his head.
The reason I asked that was that on the third day of my experiment, I searched the phrase “people who talk to themselves.” The top results I obtained were about an argument that people who talk to themselves aren’t crazy but instead geniuses.
Nobody reacted dramatically towards what I did on the train. Perhaps I wasn’t saying anything offensive to them. But they might just think of me differently from other passengers, in any way it could be, but not taking me as a genius — that I feel sure about.
