When Language Is All That’s Left

and more... (this won’t be my usual 2 minutes read)

Before I begin, I want to be clear✨. What you’re reading here isn’t science. It isn’t theory. (or maybe it is). It isn’t a claim about how language should be used. It’s my lived experience. Thank to all who contributed😜

For the last seven or eight months… since I started writing on Substack and began communicating with people almost entirely through messages my sensory world has narrowed in a very specific way.

No gazes.

No tone of voice.

No breath.

No smell of skin.

No subtle choreography of bodies in the same space.

No micro-expressions.

Just words on a screen.

And when words are all that’s left, they stop being abstract. They become the container. The sentence becomes the room I’m in with someone.

The phrasing becomes how they approach me.

The syntax becomes how their presence lands in my body.

And because there is nothing else to compensate or blur the edges, I feel it immediately.

How sentences land in the body, my body… maybe yours as well

I started noticing patterns.

When someone writes sharply, my body braces. The chest tightens. Breath shortens.

When someone writes vaguely, evasively, or imprecisely, my body searches.

Attention leans forward, trying to find ground.

When someone writes possessively, the belly contracts.

When someone writes spaciously, the shoulders drop. The breath deepens.

When someone writes attentively, even with very simple words, my body softens.

This isn’t about good or bad people.

And often it has nothing to do with intention.

It’s about how language moves through the nervous system.

Stripped of gaze, charm, physical warmth and smile to compensate, language shows itself in its pure form.

So… what follows comes from that noticing. From staying with how words land in my body. From learning to trust that sensation and speak it without apologizing.

This is just my experience. It may not be yours or…

But it made me exquisitely aware of how language shapes the psyche, the nervous system, desire, guilt, and pleasure… not philosophically, but somatically. So here is what I have been living.

A rare kind of training

This became a strange kind of training most people never receive.

In physical presence, we’re buffered by:

eye contact, timing, social rhythm, performance, chemistry.

Online, language is naked.

And if you stay with the sensation, instead of explaining it away, if you don’t override it with politeness or self-doubt, you begin to hear what language is really doing.

Not intellectually.

Physically.

You feel the sentence in the body before you decide what it means. This taught me more about psyche and nervous system than any concept ever could.

And then something else revealed itself

At some point, another layer appeared.

Because while it’s true that online communication seems reduced to words, it’s also not entirely true.

Over time, when you’re in contact with someone long enough, when there is honesty, attention, and mutual letting-in, you begin to feel what is behind the sentence.

Sometimes nothing is written.

And yet something is felt.

A pause carries weight.

A delay has texture.

A single emoji changes temperature.

Someone can write the same words they always do, and your body knows instantly: this is not coming from the same place.

The tone shifts.

The field shifts.

The energy behind the language changes.

You don’t interpret this.

You feel it.

Beyond words, but visible through them

This is where the paradox lives.

Language becomes everything when it’s all that’s available.

And then, once attunement forms, language becomes a surface through which something else shows itself.

Not because the words are different, but because the person behind them is. When attunement exists, you don’t just read what is written. You feel…

You begin to sense:

presence or absence,

openness or defense,

alignment or split,

saying something they mean or something they wish they meant.

This shows up subtly:

in pacing, in punctuation, in choice of emojis, in sudden formality or sudden looseness, in warmth that fades or returns.

Nothing dramatic.

Just a quiet knowing in the body.

This is deeply sensual

Because sensuality is not about touch. It’s about sensitivity to nuance. To rhythm. To timing. To what is said and what is not. And this kind of attunement only happens when time has passed, trust has formed, both people have shown themselves, even imperfectly.

You can’t fake it. And you can’t rush it. When it’s there, language stops just being a language. It becomes a trace of presence.

So no… it’s not “just words”

Reducing online connection to “only language” is incomplete. Because language is never empty. It always carries the state of the one who speaks. And when you are attuned you don’t confuse the sentence with the truth you sense whether they are aligned. You can feel when someone writes from themselves and when they write over themselves. That’s not intuition in the mystical sense. It’s NS attunement.

Why this matters

Because once you feel this you can no longer pretend. You stop arguing with what your body knows, you stop mishearing words to make them kinder. You stop apologizing for accuracy. And you don’t need to accuse anyone either. You simply notice.

This feels congruent (my new favorite word)

This feels split

This feels present

This feels gone

And you let that information guide you.

Staying with sensation

The most important practice for me has been not overriding the body. Feeling how a sentence lands. Not mishearing it to be kinder. Not translating sensation into politeness. Not apologizing for perception. Just letting the body finish its sentence.

This isn’t reaction.

It’s reporting.

And that takes awareness… especially as a woman.

A note about women and language

Most women were trained early to:

soften truth so others feel comfortable (I did, I do)

translate bodily discomfort into politeness,

doubt first sensation,

override the body to preserve harmony.

We learned to say:

“It’s fine.” “I might be wrong.” “I don’t know, maybe…” even when the body was very clear.

So staying with sensation and voicing it without accusation or apology is not trivial. It’s unlearning decades of conditioning.

And when you do it gently, honestly, without drama, something shifts.

Language lives inside us too

Another thing I noticed: language doesn’t only arrive through messages. It lives inside us as inner sentences. Thoughts like:

“I failed.”

“I shouldn’t feel this.”

“I’m responsible for this.”

Even when no one says them aloud, they still land in the body. So this isn’t only about how others write to us. It’s about how we speak internally.

Syntax shapes reality whether it’s written, spoken, or silently rehearsed.

Desire, guilt, pleasure felt, not declared

This is why certain phrases began to feel different to me, not because someone wrote them, but because I noticed how I thought them.

Desire framed as

“I want you” - sound simple. Clean. Direct. But when that sentence arrives on a screen, I feel how it moves. Desire becomes directional, forward-leaning, slightly tense. There is a subject. There is an object. There is a subtle sense of lack.

Desire framed as

“Desire arose or something warmed” feels spacious, warm, present. No claim. No grab. No pressure to response.

Guilt framed as

“I failed” or “I made a mistake” collapses identity into the event. In written form they land heavily. They fuse event with the self. The body contracts. The chest tightens. Repair becomes tangled with shame.

Guilt framed as

“Something misaligned” keeps responsibility intact without turning it into punishment. But guilt stopped sticking to identity. It became information not punishment.

Pleasure framed as

“I enjoyed it” can trigger evaluation. Felt as performance and that makes it fragile… it collapses under observation.

Pleasure framed as

“Something softened” or “something opened and stayed” lets pleasure stay. No scorekeeping. No commentary. Just inhabitation. This is where pleasure became slower, thicker, quieter and much more real.

This isn’t avoidance. It’s refinement.

About responsibility

Some people hear process-led language and think it removes accountability.

That has not been my experience at all. In fact, the opposite.

When language is kind to the body, the body has more capacity to choose differently next time.

Responsibility doesn’t come from self-attack. It comes from availability.

Process-led language doesn’t remove responsibility it removes cruelty.

And cruelty inward or outward never made anyone wiser.

What this has given Me

Language isn’t just meaning. It’s impact.

It teaches the nervous system how to brace, soften, search, or open.

When you let yourself feel that impact… without buffers, without apologies you start to see how worlds are built sentence by sentence. I am not editing reality. I am listening to it more closely.

That is all this is.

A woman noticing how words shape her body when words are almost all that’s left.

And trusting that what she feels is not something to correct, but something to hear.