Why the Language You Use Is Not Your Own

On borrowed words, borrowed selves, and the search for a voice that is actually yours

At some point, perhaps in your twenties, perhaps later, you may have caught yourself mid-sentence and thought: why am I saying this?

Not because it wasn't true in some abstract sense. But because it wasn't yours. It was something borrowed — from a parent, a teacher, a tradition you grew up inside. You had absorbed it so completely that it had taken on the texture of your own thought, your own feeling. And yet something in you recognized: this is not me speaking.

That moment of recognition is what this piece is about. And it is what my new book, A New Language — Flowing in Being, begins with.

In 1970, I met a woman named Alessandra at a friend ‘s dinner. We had barely spoken when she moved her finger slowly around the rim of a glass and said, looking at me: "Too bad I will never be able to communicate to you in words what I am feeling right now touching the glass..." Those words touched, with immediate precision, a laceration I had felt for as long as I could remember: the impotence of language, the unbridgeable distance between what I feel, what I am, and what I am able to convey with words.

The experience she was naming is not exotic or unusual. It is, I believe, one of the most universal human experiences — and one of the most systematically ignored. We use language all day, every day. We rarely stop to ask: whose language is this?

The language we use carries within it the entire architecture of our conditioning. The beliefs we absorbed from our parents. The values that were drilled into us at school. The judgments we internalized so early that we have forgotten they were ever given to us. The images of who we should be, how we should speak, what we should want.

This conditioning is not simply a collection of opinions we could change if we chose. It is, as I describe in A New Language, a deep unconscious grammar — a set of rules operating below the level of deliberate thought, shaping not only what we say but what we are able to perceive, feel, and experience. We describe reality in the terms we were given, and we live inside that description as though it were reality itself.

This is why the question of language is not merely aesthetic or philosophical. It is existential. As long as the words we use are not rooted in our own direct experience — as long as they refer to what we have read, heard, and adopted rather than what we have lived — we are, quite literally, living someone else's life.

I spent years, in my twenties, in a kind of inner crisis around this. At one point I almost stopped speaking — not from depression but from a recognition that most of what I was saying had no flesh in it. No roots. I had words. I didn't have a voice. It was only gradually, through years of meditation, self-inquiry, and working with people, that I began to understand what a language of Being might feel like: words that arose from the present moment, from direct experience, that left no residue behind them — no afterthought cloud of "I should have said" or "why did I say that."

Finding that language is the invitation of this book. It begins not with a set of techniques but with an act of honest attention: listening to the words you use, and asking, simply, whether they are yours.

Not your ideological position's. Not your family's. Not the story you have talked about yourself so many times that you have mistaken it for who you are.

But yours.

A New Language — Flowing in Being launches August 28th, as a physical book, eBook, and audiobook. Over the coming weeks I will be sharing some of the book's central ideas here on Substack. I hope they land in you the way Alessandra's words landed in me — as a recognition of something you already know.