My throat tightened before I even realized I was crying.
I was mid-sentence—trying to say something personal, something that mattered—and suddenly I couldn’t get the words out. My chest constricted. My jaw trembled. My voice collapsed into silence.
And in that split second, all I could think was: Damn it. Not now.
I was frustrated. Embarrassed. Emotion felt like it was getting in the way—like it was interrupting what I was trying so hard to say.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened.
Sometimes it’s when I’m sharing something deeply personal, sometimes it takes me by surprise. That same surge of feeling that shuts off my ability to speak.
Because when you cry, your vocal cords constrict. It becomes harder to form words.
For most of my life, I saw this as a failure of communication. A breakdown. A derailment.
But lately, I’ve started to wonder: what if it’s not a failure at all?
What if it’s a different language?
The language of emotion.
A language we’ve forgotten how to speak.
When I cry while telling a story—when I pause to breathe, to feel, to stay present—I’m no longer just communicating about something. I’m communicating from it.
And the person listening doesn’t just hear me. They feel me.
Because emotion is a kind of transmission.
It bypasses logic. It travels body to body. Nervous system to nervous system.
It says: this is real, and you’re safe to feel it with me.
But here’s the challenge: this language has been buried.
Dismissed as weakness. Treated as an interruption.
We’ve learned to fear emotion. To rush it. To talk over it.
And so many of us—myself included—are now adults who never learned how to speak it fluently.
I still catch myself trying to silence it.
Speeding up my words to outrun the tears.
Clenching my body to keep the feelings from surfacing.
Trying to sound “put together” when what I really need is to fall apart, even if just for a moment.
But now, when that happens, I try something else.
I pause.
I breathe.
I create space to let the emotion speak, without my voice interrupting.
Because emotion is not in the way.
It is the way.
And the more I allow it to come out, the more I notice something wild happens:
The people listening lean in.
Not because I’m polished. But because I’m present.
Because the truth isn’t always neat. It isn’t always easy to say.
But it’s honest. And honesty, when delivered through emotion, doesn’t need polish. It just needs space.
Emotions birth transformation, and the process of childbirth can be a teacher and a mentor to relearn the language of emotions. The deep breathing. The pauses. The contractions. The surrender to taking whatever time it takes. Emotion, too, comes in waves. It asks us to stop pushing against it and start surrendering to it. To stay with it. To let it move through us.
That’s the language of emotion.
And we need to remember it.
We need to relearn how to speak it.
So if you’re someone who gets choked up when you speak about what matters—
If you’ve felt ashamed for being “too emotional” or wished you could “just get the words out”— I see you.
And I want you to know: you are not doing it wrong.
You are speaking a language the world desperately needs to remember. Keep showing the way.
If you want support reconnecting to that language—
If you’re ready to stop fighting your emotions and start listening to what they’re really saying—
That’s the work I do in coaching.
Deep. Present. Unarmored.
Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can say…
is said without words at all.
