I am the Mayor of Yappington City. None dare question my ability to perform the infinite yapworks.

For the past 3+ years, I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to a camera, both live or recorded. I can say that a skill I’ve improved is my ability to talk about all sort of topics and slowly getting better at expressing my own inner thoughts honestly. I sort of became more comfortable with expressing myself as time went on even though it felt like in the moments I was speaking I was simply being me. Just compare my first few videos with the recent ones I’ve made to see the difference.

However, I want to explore sort of the meta idea of yapping, or basically what does talking about things with a combination of honesty and entertainment actually does. As I’ve prefaced, it slowly builds up a subtle confidence in expressing myself, at least as long as I continually choose to be authentic. The real benefit for me that isn’t very obvious is how yapping structures my own thoughts in real time. As in, I am taking the chaos of my own mind and tying it together through the process of yapping itself to hopefully express a pure thought or idea. It is sort of a reiterating of my own thoughts that becomes a reminder to myself that these thoughts are what I’ve been thinking about, but haven’t tried to express. When I try to express them, I react in real time how my words aren’t completely what I am trying to express and adjust them to the best of my ability. That live editing to some may be a form of small censorship, but I see it as a test to see if I have truly shaped the thought into something more tangible, a word rather than a nebulous thought moment in my mind.

Onto the drawbacks, the big one is the fact that yapping doesn’t really change anything. While yes, there may be words I can express that will definitely cause a reaction to others and may result in change, I realize that the words I say are both powerful and useless. Powerful in that I could easily choose to say something completely out of my own built life to change the relationships of everyone around me. Useless in that the words have no weight to them unless backed by serious action. That weight is missing in most words that are expressed.

I’m thinking that the weight of words only really have an impact when loaded with context that’s relevant to your life. While me saying “you have to keep trying in spite of everything” will sound like a idealistic quote to most, it may have a deeper impact when I say it to someone who has lived a very similar life to mine. Or perhaps they needed someone to say those words to them at just the right moment. Without the weight of context, all of these words come off as flowery language, a nice saying you read in a book then forget about in the next moment.

Now, the real problematic thing is that even if I do have all the context required, it doesn’t really help all too much to the one person it should matter to, me. I’ve built up a vague framework for myself of how I think life is and what I should do, yet trying to reiterate them to myself seems to not change the way I act. If I tell myself to take a shower later today, then proceed to ignore it and end up not taking one, it feels as if I am not the one who needs convincing. It could be that my body doesn’t speak the same language as the words and thoughts I express towards myself, or at the very least those words and thoughts need to somehow be translated to the circuits in my body.

While I may intellectually have all the proper language and ideas to describe what’s going on with me and all of who I am, it feels as though it is inherently disconnected from the “reality” of who I am physically in the moment. So is the answer to stop yapping and take action towards what I intended to talk about? Yes, but the yapping itself has its own merit that should not be completely removed. When used well, as in talking about things I honestly and authentically feel/think about then moving that towards some plan of action, it can be a powerful yet subtle reminder to myself that I am actively retaining what I want to become. That the thoughts are in circulation and they simply need to be put towards the small actions that will lead me to change. One word at a time, or really, one reminder at a time of who I want to become or shift within myself or the world around me.