January 20, 2016

January 20, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In the past, I often experienced an incredible urge to talk. Talking was absolutely the most important thing for me. One can imagine how this must have affected others. To most people my intensity level was off-putting and as a consequence I felt rejected. This in turn made talking even more important to me. At one point, I got so frustrated by the fact that nobody wanted to talk with me in the way that I wanted to talk, that, to prevent more rejection, I completely stopped talking with others. This was the period in which I discovered that I was able to talk with myself. 

At first, it was sad to be talking out loud by myself as it seemed to me as if I had been condemned to it, but soon I found out that this created an opportunity for me that didn’t exist before. I could be alone and not cause any havoc. To my surprise, I was able to say many things I had not been able to say during my conversation with others. I enjoyed talking with myself so much that I spend hours of doing this and I made hundreds of audio-recordings of it. I found it as intriguing to talk out loud with myself and produce these recordings as to listen to these recordings. 

You could say I really got to know myself by listening to the conversations with myself which I had recorded. During this exploration, I figured out what went wrong in my conversations with others. While being alone, I particularly enjoyed the fact that I was able to produce the sound which I wanted to have. As I was alone, I felt stimulated to listen to myself. My circumstances made me aware that nobody apparently had been capable of making me listen to myself. By talking out loud by myself, however, I began to listen to myself. I was fascinated by the fact that others couldn’t make me listen to myself, but that I was capable of doing what they couldn’t.