Towards Writing
Voice as Direction
There’s a way we come into the world that sets the foundation for who we become.1 And who we become is who we are when we write.
We tend to treat writing as a cognitive act. We arrange our ideas in structure and prose. We build our arguments. We have our unique style and honing of voice. You can recognize Vonnegut by his cadence, Hegel by his density, a medical textbook by its clinical foray.
But writing is also relational. It’s behavior rendered in language. It shows how a body approaches connection. If you read closely, you can hear whether the writer is moving toward or away. You can sense whether the language anticipates a response, braces for one, or carefully manages expectations.
I am drawn to the physiology of communication. When I’m editing draft after draft, what am I doing, actually? I’m asking: where does this language come from? How does it create distance or hold closeness?
To understand that, I have to look at how I learned, before words, what being close to someone felt like.
Our social selves are regulated through the vagus nerve—a system shaped before birth, refined in early relationship, and carried forward into how we move through the world.2
Before language, we have needs. We need to eat, to be held, to feel safe. Even in the womb, the nervous system is already managing demand.3 After birth, feeding requires coordination with another body: suck, swallow, breathe, rest. Regulation takes shape through availability, timing, and response. These early exchanges train the nervous system's predictions about how and when needs will be met, a process some researchers believe is shaped by how the vagus nerve processes time and connection.4
What the nervous system tracks here is cost. The energy that is spent and conserved, which regulates the capacity to stay engaged or capacity to withdraw. These calculations are metabolic, allostatic—part of how the body maintains balance in a changing environment.5
Over time, these patterns settle into what feels possible. How long the system can stay open. How much uncertainty it can hold. How close it can remain before pulling back. Later, when these patterns are activated, they arrive as reality and certainty. As this is how things are.
Your conscious self may want connection. You may experience yourself as open, reaching, engaged. And yet, your nervous system may be organizing behavior according to predictions that were calibrated when survival depended entirely on someone else’s availability.
Your behavior can diverge from your self-experience. Cost and risk are calculated by systems built long before wanting became something you could think about.
From there, certain questions arise—questions that reveal the social architecture of writing itself. Language carries the structure of the relational world it was learned inside of, including assumptions about distance, availability, and response.
Are you writing with openness, moving toward the audience?
Is there language that reaches and then pulls back?
Does the writing expect to be met, or does it manage that expectation in advance?
Is a benefit of the doubt extended to the reader, or is the language already preparing for disappointment?
Writing with discernment carries these assumptions with it.
In Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, Marshall Rosenberg writes that communication is about staying connected to what is alive in the other person—letting them feel what makes them feel alive, and listening for that in return.6
On the page, that becomes visible in the writing itself:
whether it names what actually happened or drifts into generalities; whether it identifies a need or stays abstract; whether there’s a clear request, or whether the language leaves the reader guessing.
Of course, you don’t see your nervous system state directly while writing. You don’t get an fMRI to see your brain function when your boss is waiting on an email, or when a paper is due and the clock is running, or when you’re trying to write a speech and your body tightens before you even know what you’re going to say.
So the question becomes: where does it show up?
It shows up in the writing itself. In what gets said quickly and what takes ten drafts. In sentences that stay provisional and sentences that decide. In how much specificity feels possible. In whether the language moves forward or keeps a safe distance.
I felt this viscerally when I tried to repair a relationship through a letter. It was a heavy, emotional period. I certainly wasn’t thinking about polyvagal theory; I was trying to write the right thing to manage my state. Later, reading the draft felt like reading a transcript of my nervous system’s predictions. What looked like an attempt to connect was, in fact, a record of what I believed further contact would cost. I discovered that my sentences had already made decisions my conscious mind hadn’t agreed to.
Looking back, I can depersonalize the two letters I wrote. Using the language of the vagus nerve, I see direction: toward and away. I see where sentences foreclosed, where language tried to manage the outcome. Writing with closure offered safety in my body—even when it came at a relational cost.
The first letter, written from dorsal shutdown, enacts withdrawal while speaking of connection. The second, written from a more ventral-supported state, enacts an invitation. The shift in language follows a shift in autonomic state
I won’t include the full letters here. Instead, a few phrases show how I was trying to reconnect while the language itself was moving toward ending.
I wrote in nonspecific terms: “Whatever it is I did.” I kept the mechanism unnamed, at a distance, a way of speaking about a relationship without having to actually cost myself anything. Even though I was writing to try to reconnect, I relied on farewell language: “I’m forever grateful for the time.” Gratitude can be a closing gesture, a way of sealing something before it’s truly over. I minimized relational connection by describing it as a “small chapter in your life.” I can see now that the language that reduces a relationship to something brief and contained was a way of managing potential disappointment by making the loss smaller in advance. I referred to shared experiences as “memories I have so far”—already past tense, already archived, even as I was writing to revive them. And I ended with “Hope you be well,” which sounds kind, but functions here as a release, a gentle closing of the door and protection against addressing what really mattered.
I was writing with the aim of reconnecting. Each sentence, however, organized itself around the expectation of rejection and self-protection. My dorsal nervous system had already marked this experience as unsafe, while my conscious mind was trying to write toward connection. The writing carried that decision in how the sentences were built—guarded, past-oriented, and oriented toward an ending that had not yet arrived.
When I read the ending of that first letter to my mentor, he listened and said:
“This doesn’t sound like your voice.”
To me, that meant this wasn’t the me who wants to be open in the world, who writes from his values, and wants to connect. The language was braced. Already leaving. Trying to manage energetic cost before any real contact could happen. Whatever relational connection I thought I was reaching for, the sentences revealed other plans.
Then I read some neuroscience that changed how I understood what I was doing.
I wanted to know what in my body was pulling away while reaching for connection. What it means to write during an emotionally heavy period and still move toward someone. How to cultivate the experience that overcomes the pull.
Lisa Feldman Barrett writes about neural networks responsible for interoception—the brain’s ongoing representation of signals from the body. These representations form a core ingredient in emotion and action. Both are needed in writing. Both are especially needed in writing that is emotional.
“We aren’t simply at the mercy of what arises,” she writes, “We participate in how these states are shaped”.7
That helped.
While writing the second draft—the one I would eventually send—I stopped trying to manage my nervous system by managing someone else’s reaction. I wasn’t writing for an outcome. I was writing to name how I had acted, to take responsibility, and to invite someone into a new way of being. To say: this is how I will be in the world, if you would like to join me.
This felt more representative, in body, in language, and in direction, of what I was after.
Barrett gave me the physiology of that reaching. We participate in our own emotional states. We shape them through concept and attention. Reading her, something opened. I could write the story of closeness and invitation. The nervous system that had foreclosed connection could learn a different prediction.
I remember saying out loud, “I’m free.”
And if you ever have that feeling you feel the body transform. Free to write from openness. Free to move toward the person on the other side of the page.
There became a lightness as I sat down to edit my words. This felt more ventral. This felt more true.
I wrote eighteen sentences in the second draft of that conclusion. Each sentence built a newer version of me. I let uncertainty hold, and I stayed open. There was a rhythm to the language that built a sense of the future. It was grounded in as much openness and possibility as I could manage at the time. It invited continuation. It implied a reaching outward.
It said: I’m not going to fall apart if this is rejected. I’ll be open to receiving reciprocal relationship and moving through the world that way.
In the language of the ventral vagus nerve, the body had opened and engaged in the potential of reciprocal attention.
The writing followed.
Language leaves traces of how we were acting—whether we were withdrawing, mobilizing, or staying present—long after the moment has passed.
Before we write these patterns as we go through adulthood, our bodies learned—before words—what it meant to need, to reach, and to be met.
Writing, word by word, sentence by sentence, concept by concept, can be a way of returning to that original bodily capacity to reach, even when you don’t know what comes back.
Porges, S. W., & Furman, S. A. (2011). The early development of the autonomic nervous system provides a neural platform for social behavior: A polyvagal perspective. Infant and Child Development, *20*(1), 106–118.
The unique features of the autonomic nervous system that support mammalian social behavior start to develop during the last trimester of fetal life. The architecture of connection is laid down before birth and refined through relationship.
The mammalian nervous system did not develop solely to survive in dangerous and life-threatening contexts, but also to promote social interactions and social bonds in safe environments.” Porges and Furman describe how a “face-heart connection” evolved in mammals, linking neural regulation of the heart to the muscles of facial expression, vocalization, and listening. This linkage forms an integrated “Social Engagement System.” Unlike reptiles, “birth for mammals is not a transition into independence, but an extension of the period of dependence that begins in utero.” And this dependence never fully ends. “Social separation and isolation for humans, regardless of age, leads to profound disruption in the ability to regulate physiological state and compromises both physical and mental health.” As humans mature, they “search for appropriate others (e.g., friends, partners, etc.) with whom they may form dyads capable of symbiotic regulation.” We are built for connection. The vagus is the architecture of that building (Porges & Furman, 2011)
Before an embryo has a stomach or lungs or heart, it has a cellular map. HOX genes act as molecular address labels during development, telling cells where they belong along the body’s head-to-tail axis. The vagus nerve’s fibers appear to be organized according to these same embryonic coordinates. Researchers call this principle chronotopy: the fibers are arranged not by which organ they will eventually serve, but by when their parent cells were born during development. The architecture of our social nervous system is laid down before we have organs to sense, before we have a body to regulate suggesting the wiring for connection before we have anything to connect and our body has anything to “regulate” metabolically.
Shaffer, C., Barrett, L. F., & Quigley, K. S. (2023). Signal processing in the vagus nerve: Hypotheses based on new genetic and anatomical evidence. Biological Psychology, 182, 108626.
Shaffer et al. (2023) propose that the brain builds predictive models of the body, using past experiences to anticipate needs and correct errors—a strategy more efficient than simple stimulus-response. They hypothesize that the vagus nerve may process temporal patterns of sensory input, not just relay it, meaning early experiences of need and response could train the nervous system’s expectations, shaping both physiological regulation and social development.
Sterling’s concept of allostasis—anticipatory physiological regulation—is discussed in Shaffer et al. (2023) as a framework for understanding how the vagus nerve supports metabolic and social coordination. The vagus nerve mediates communication between brain and body in this metabolic dialogue. Barrett and colleagues describe allostasis as "anticipating the body's metabolic needs and preparing to meet those needs before they arise." The system aims to "maximize metabolic efficiency" through coordination rather than rigid set points. What Sterling calls "stability through change"
Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (3rd ed.). PuddleDancer Press.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p. 57.