A PERSONAL CONVERSATION

ARE YOU SPENDING THE PANDEMIC TALKING TO YOURSELF? IF YOU LIVE ALONE, YOU'RE NOT ALONE

One bleak pandemic day in November, Aisha Tyler caught herself vacuuming the inside of her freezer. Then she scolded herself. Yes, out loud.

“You're insane,” she recalls saying. “What are you doing? You have to stop this right now.”

Sometimes the Los Angeles-based actress will shout an expletive and tell herself to “snap out of it.” On brighter days, she'll congratulate herself on what a good job she's doing and call for a celebration.

“I have definitely announced happy hour in my apartment several times to no one in particular,” she says, “and then I'll tell myself what a cute martini it is, and I'll tell myself it was delicious.”

Humans leave little unspoken, and this past year, as many of us have avoided social events and worked from home alone, we've been forced to talk out loud to the only person still around to listen: ourselves.

Sure, it may take the form of bantering with our pets, scolding the politicians on TV or cajoling our malfunctioning printers, but that's really just another way of hearing our own voice, helping us discern what exactly is going on inside that head of ours.

Many self-talkers worry others would think they're crazy. But no one is there to know.

Living alone, I've noticed my own tendency to talk to household objects, calling them “thing” or “man,” or, in the case of the snow boots I reconnected with recently, “my friends.” I scolded the toppling bottles in the fridge for “making trouble.” My voice will also involuntarily retrieve sounds from childhood, imitating my grandfather, with a frustrated “Christ, almighty,” or repeating dialogue from a Sesame Street Christmas album.

What's going on here? Charles Fernyhough, a psychology professor at Durham University and author of The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves says research shows people talk out loud more when under stress or facing cognitive challenges — and that it can be helpful for children when solving puzzles or other tasks.

He likens it to writing something down on paper. “If you're putting words in the air,” he says, “it might be easier to hang onto them.”

That's the approach of Danielle Lupton, a political-science professor in her 30s at Colgate University who's been working from home and rousing herself from the couch with vocalized orders like, “After this episode, you're going to get up and wash the dishes.”

“It's a public commitment you say to yourself,” she explains.

Not all self-talkers are quite so comfortable with their new habit. “What's the point? The sound doesn't need to come out. You're already in there,” says Mike Carrozza, a 29-year-old standup comedian. To him, it feels like “the pandemic won another bit of my normalcy.”

Some self-talkers amuse themselves by deploying personas and accents. While binge-watching The Crown over Thanksgiving weekend, Elisabeth Rivette, a 23-year-old law student at St. Louis University, started to speak to herself as Margaret Thatcher. “I'd be cracking myself up about how to pronounce pillow or lamp or something,” she says.

And Paris Jacobs, 43, the coowner of a swim club in Vienna, Va., who found her own voice keeping her company when she was isolated for five days in the hospital with COVID-19.

“You wouldn't necessarily realize you were talking to yourself,” she recalls, “and then you'd say something and be like, `Oh, there's nobody else here.'”

Our urge to talk reveals just how much COVID-19 is a mental test as well as a physical one. When William Broyles Jr. was writing the screenplay for the 2000 film Cast Away, he stranded himself at a deserted Mexican beach, to research the tactics of survival. But one day he went to spear his morning stingray and met a volleyball that had washed ashore. He decorated it with seashells and seaweed, and started talking to it. Broyles recalls that eventually, “I stopped and said — to him but really to myself — `Idiot! This is the movie!' It's not about physical survival, it's about connection. Talking is how we connect. It makes us human.”

Samuel Veissière, an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill University who has studied tulpamancy, suspects that during the pandemic, “a tulpamancer might be doing better than average because they're used to being alone,” he says. “They've developed these coping mechanisms. They're able to entertain themselves.”

Of course, speaking out loud when no one else is physically present is part of long-held tradition — one that has taken on greater urgency for many people lately.

When the Bronx hit its pandemic peak last spring, the emergency room at St. Barnabas Hospital was filled with the noise of huffing ventilators, beeping IV pumps, intercoms crackling with commands of “code blue,” and patients crying for help. So when he left work, in the silence of his car, senior attending physician Ernest Patti would take the time to speak aloud to Big Louie.

On occasion, it was Big Louise. Or it had no gender. Patti, 60, who was raised Catholic, wanted to account for all possibilities.

“Whoever you are up there, this makes no sense to me, us working tirelessly to keep these people alive, and when they die they have to die alone,” he recalls saying one night, after he held an elderly woman's hand in her final moments. He yelled expletives. He asked if he should quit. “This is my passion. I have to care for people. But God, if it means caring for people like this where they die alone, I don't know if I have the strength.”

Patti has continued praying to Big Louie. But he has a new reason.

In August, his son arrived in Miami to start college, went swimming and dove straight into a sandbar. He couldn't move his arms or legs. Patti and his ex-wife have been caring for him ever since, hoping for a recovery.

Patti has asked Big Louie questions for much of his life. This year, the answers have been slow to arrive. But on the plane to Miami he continued the conversation:

“Seriously, what's the purpose of this? Is this another lesson? ... Why him? Why not me?”

Patti realized a fellow passenger in his row was listening.

“That's OK,” the man said. “During this pandemic, I think we're all doing it.”

THE PANDEMIC WON ANOTHER BIT OF MY NORMALCY.

SBH HEALTH SYSTEM Ernest Patti, the senior attending physician at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, says he would talk to imaginary friend Big Louie during breaks.