Speak No Evil: Day One
For my Into the Wild Project, I decided that I was going to be mute for three days. I didn’t really know what to expect going in, but before I started I thought that trying to communicate without talking would actually be sort of fun.
Nope, I was wrong. Completely, ten thousand percent wrong.
I didn’t really notice anything at first. My morning was basically the same: wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, go the bus, etc. I didn’t really need to talk much on the bus either; most people are absorbed in their ipods so conversation is at a minimum.
But as soon as I got to school, things got a lot tougher. Some people knew that I was doing a project, and understand that I couldn’t talk. However, most people had no idea what was going on. They would say hi to me, ask a simple question like “how’s it going,” and all I could do in return was stare at them. I thought that I’d be able to get by through hand gestures and pointing, but that quickly proved to be a fantasy. It turns out that I’m actually pretty terrible at charades, because almost nobody could understand what I was trying to say.
By 7:08 AM, I was already feeling shut off from the rest of the world. Where before talking had been an almost automatic response to just about anything, now I was unable to respond to even the simplest of questions. I would be standing there looking like an idiot trying to mime something, and think to myself how much faster I could get the same information across, if only I could speak.
I felt like a prisoner inside my own mind.
