People usually talk to themselves in the first person. When trying to understand our feelings or sort out why we’re feeling anxious, we ask ourselves questions like “Why am I so upset?” or “What’s causing me to feel this way?” We use words like “I,” “me,” or “my” (all first-person pronouns) to refer to ourselves.

One group of people were told to stick with this standard approach. They were asked to use first-person pronouns when trying to understand their feelings and to ask themselves questions like “Why do I feel this way?” or “What are the underlying causes and reasons for my feelings?”

The other group used language to take a slightly different perspective. Rather than trying to understand their anxiety from their own vantage point, they were asked to take an outsider’s perspective. Rather than referring to themselves using “I” or “me,” they were encouraged to talk to themselves like someone else would, using words like “you,” their name, or “he” or “she” instead.

TRY THIS: Write about your own feelings of belonging and not belonging.

What groups do you belong to?

When do you feel as though you don’t belong?

What undercuts your feelings of belonging?

What supports your feelings of belonging?

Often our language is too technical, mechanistic, medical, and psychological, but falls short of our experience. Poetic speech is more personal and more adequately and precisely names the mood.

Still, a hundred and fifty people worked for us at EMP, and every one of them had to be aligned with the mission. We needed language. Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.

It’s hard to fully convey the tragedy of losing a language. For the same reasons AI researchers first gravitated toward language to build their technologies, the loss of a language extends far beyond the loss of a form of communication. Each language encodes within it rich histories, cultures, knowledge; it is the collective product of millions of people across time grasping for the sounds and written forms to capture the subtlest observations about the universe, about life, about the human experience; to share with one another stunning beauty and painful failure; to teach a child, to learn from an elder; to express love.