Atmospheric Storytelling
Verbal versus Felt: A reflection on intimacy, silence, and understanding
Language is often treated as the primary source of connection, yet language itself extends far beyond just words. Language, and its forms, shapes how we perceive, interpret, and experience our emotional reality.
Verbal language is the conscious act to create connection, but connection itself does not always guarantee understanding. Connection initiates our emotional experience, while understanding is the anchor that makes a relationship sustained and real. Connection can exist before articulation, and become understood through mutual presence, rhythm, and observation.
This piece reflects the experience of a building connection between two culturally distinct individuals — French & American — despite verbal constraints. The language barrier redirects communication’s typical defaults towards reliance on different forms of translation. Body language, tone, and silence.
Found between them is a silence reflecting an intimacy that develops naturally and slowly. Felt rather than spoken. This silence removes the ability to readily explain and perform, and forces one to be situated within one’s self.
Connection then, moves from its natural dependence of verbal communication, towards perception. The comfort found in the in-between.
As language produces your perception to the world around you, connection transcends beyond its linguistic structure.
The structure of a language influences not only how we communicate emotion, but how we experience it internally. In the English Language we identify with our emotions, saying, “I am hungry”. While in French the emotion is moving through you, “J’ai faim”, which translates, I have hunger, the emotion is more fluid, and less distinctive to the individual.
These linguistic differences do not definitively determine one’s emotional understanding, but offers a glimpse into the internal point of view that the language lends its experience to through its structure. The French lens subtly frames emotions and sensations as experiences one has rather than identities one becomes.
The emotional language begins to carry more weight than the words themselves. The feeling and atmosphere becomes the shared language that carries their mutual understanding, which in turn creates meaning.
Creating meaning within a connection, requires this shared understanding. Understanding cannot be achieved through processing of words alone. Understanding goes beyond the literal, intangible to physical reality. Rather, true understanding is felt, does not require explanation, a subconscious act. This piece strips the reliance on verbal language to communicate meaning, removing performance and enforcing simply being to take priority.
Language is multi-faceted and requires an understanding that transforms speaking into seeing. Understanding does not solely derive from hearing someone speak, but learning how to situate ourselves within their point of view, seeing how they see.
This is when intimacy begins, when understanding ceases requirement of constant translation, when connection becomes a calm knowing, where pressure dissolves, and is replaced by genuine presence.
