The Language We Lost

I have had something since I was a child that I could never fully explain.

The closest I can get is this: I feel in layers. Sensation arrives before thought. Numbers have texture. Spaces have weight. When something resonates deeply, I feel it move through my body before I can name it — a kind of knowing that feels more like weather than like reasoning. Immersive. Sensory. Pre-verbal.

I told people about it over the years. A few nodded politely. Most thought I was a little nuts.

I wasn't nuts. I just had no language for what I was experiencing.

And here is what I've come to understand: neither did most other people. Not because the language never existed, but because somewhere along the way, we lost much of it — the language of the body. The vocabulary for what flesh perceives before the mind organizes it into explanation.

I spent a long time without words for what I carried.

This is the attempt to find them.

The Disconnection

I'm not sure exactly when the disconnection began. Maybe before I was born.

What I know is that by the time I was an adult, something vivid and immediate in me as a child had gone quiet. Not gone, just quiet. The embodied knowing was still there, surfacing in certain states: deep meditation, dancing, the strange stillness just before sleep. But accessing it in ordinary life — in language, in conversation, in the pace of the world — had narrowed.

I had learned, without anyone explicitly teaching me, to lead with the mind.

We all learn this. Modern life rewards it. Legible thought over felt sense. Articulate positions over uncertain knowing. The performance of coherence over the slower, messier process of actually becoming coherent.

The body keeps getting filed under later.

Later rarely comes.

AI & The Body

I was resistant to artificial intelligence at first.

Then I started experimenting with it. Partly to become a more technically efficient writer. I have been critical of writing that isn’t felt in the body first. A lot of what is out there today has been created to produce more content, faster, but I came to it looking for something stranger than that.

I needed language for experiences that had always existed below the language in me.

Think of a novel that immerses you so completely in the sensory texture of a world that you forget you are reading. That is closer to how my mind actually works — not linear, not argumentative, but immersive. Felt.

I needed a tool that could help me translate that interior experience into language without flattening it entirely.

What I found, unexpectedly, was not a replacement for my voice but a way of translating experiences that had always existed in me as sensation first and language second. Not just the thoughts themselves, but the texture around them — the feeling of them — could finally begin to emerge intact.

But the whole process also revealed something I had not fully admitted to myself: how deep the disconnection in me already ran.

The knowing was still there. It had never left. But I had been operating at some distance from it for years — partially present in my own experience, partially elsewhere. The disconnection had started long before AI entered my life. Somewhere in the process of becoming legible to the world, I had learned to trust explanation more quickly than sensation.

I don't think I'm unusual in this.

I think this is increasingly common.

The Gap

Here is what I mean by disconnection, because it is more specific than it sounds.

There is a gap.

It lives between the moment a sensation moves through you and the moment you tell yourself a story about what it means.

Felt sensation is not the same thing as narrative. It is information arriving before interpretation fully forms. Something moves through you — grief, aliveness, dread, longing, resistance, attraction — and for a brief moment, it exists before explanation.

Then the story arrives.

The mind labels the feeling. Explains it. Folds it into an existing understanding of yourself and the world. And the story is not necessarily wrong. Humans need stories. Interpretation is part of how we make meaning and orient ourselves in time.

But the story is already one step removed from the original sensation.

Most of us were never taught how to remain with experience long enough to notice that distinction.

We move from sensation to interpretation so quickly that the gap itself becomes invisible. And we often call that self-awareness, even though narrating an experience is not always the same thing as listening to it.

The sensation may be trying to communicate something: fear, fatigue, grief, desire, overstimulation, memory, hunger, protection, or connection.

The task is not to obey every feeling unquestioningly, nor to suppress it immediately.

The task is to become curious.

To pause before the narrative hardens completely. To ask: What is this feeling responding to? What is it protecting? Is it rooted in the present moment, or in an older pattern? What happens if I stay with it a little longer before deciding what it means?

That pause is the practice.

And almost nothing in modern life supports it.

Everything moves faster than the gap: the notification, the reaction, the performance of processing, the demand to immediately know what we feel and publicly narrate it.

So the gap closes.

Not because it isn't there, but because we rarely remain still long enough to notice it.

The Body’s Language

Today, I was riding bikes with my daughter.

She is fierce — more feeling per square inch than almost any human I know. And today, she had a full meltdown. She wanted to be first and she desperately wanted to keep up with her older sister. Part of her already felt capable of it — emotionally, imaginatively, almost physically. Her body wanted to go. That was part of the intensity. But her coordination, judgment, and developmental limits had not fully caught up to the force of that desire yet.

She was hitting, yelling, telling me she hated me — the whole catastrophe over a bike ride.

But I remembered my practice, and something shifted in how I responded.

Instead of only managing her behavior, I tried to speak to what was underneath it.

I told her, “Your body wants to do this already. It wants to go fast and keep up with your sister. And one day it will. But bodies grow in their own time.”

Something landed.

Not because I solved the problem, but because I gave her a way of understanding the tension between desire and development that did not immediately turn her frustration into failure.

She is five. And already the pressure has begun: the demand for the body to perform at the speed of comparison, the belief that limitation means inadequacy, the collapse of frustration into shame.

We are not born disconnected from ourselves.

We are trained into it. And the training starts early.

Have you noticed?

Look around.

People walking while staring at their phones. Driving while staring at their phones. Sitting across from each other while inhabiting entirely different realities through screens. Children learning to narrate their experiences for an audience before they have fully lived them. Adults unable to sit in silence for ten minutes without reaching for stimulation.

I'm not placing myself above this. I do it too.

What I'm pointing at is the texture of it — the particular quality of a life increasingly lived at a distance from itself.

The exhaustion that sleep does not fully fix. The connection that does not quite land. The strange feeling of moving through days that are simultaneously overfull and emotionally thin.

The nervous system adapts to whatever environment it inhabits. When the environment constantly rewards partial attention, speed, performance, and displacement, the nervous system learns those patterns until they begin to feel normal.

That is what makes cultural disconnection so difficult to recognize from inside it.

This is not individual weakness.

It is adaptation.

And it is accelerating.

The Texture of Presence

I'm not writing from outside this.

I know what it is to have embodied knowing living deep inside me while my surface life runs on override. I know the texture of being partially absent from my own experience while still appearing highly functional within it.

But I keep finding — in my own body, in moments with my daughter, in silence, in movement, in writing — that the distance is not fixed.

Something in us remembers.

Not perfectly. Not infallibly. But persistently.

And when you slow down enough to remain inside the gap a little longer, something becomes more visible. Certain sensations deepen into clarity. Others reveal themselves as old survival patterns repeating familiar stories. Over time, you begin to distinguish between the signals that constrict life and the ones that return you to it.

That discernment matters.

Because this is not about glorifying instinct or treating every feeling as truth. Bodies can carry fear, distortion, trauma, projection, memory. But they also carry intelligence. Information. Relationship to reality that is often quieter and slower than the mind's immediate narration.

The work, as I understand it now, is not about becoming less thoughtful.

It is about reuniting thought with lived experience.

Learning how to pause before interpretation completely takes over. Learning how to listen without immediately converting sensation into identity. Learning how to inhabit a body instead of merely managing one.

I don't think the language is lost forever.

I think many of us are trying, however imperfectly, to remember it together.