the torment of mercy

So, yay for mercy, right, Reader?

Well, I wish I could say I received that mercy with open, unassuming hands and let it wash over me with abandon. That I was immediately revived as my aching soul rushed in to be held, welcoming their care and attention with grace and dignity.

But the truth is that it set me to wrestle myself as my system rushed to titrate it. At times I clammed up and closed off from what was offered.

Not because it wasn’t good or kind or real—
but because I didn’t have a narrative that allowed for me to believe that I was someone who deserved freely offered nurture.

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I had a script that didn’t allow me to see myself as just another human being with problems—but rather as the inherent, embodied problem. That no matter what happened to me, it was my fault and my own problem to fix.

Primed from childhood abuse and neglect, and discipled into a dysfunctional religious spirituality, my self-concept could be summed up by GK Chesterton’s well-known response to a newspaper editorial,

"Dear Sir:

Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?'

I am."

My needs had often been treated like threats. And I wasn’t used to being tended to, without strings.

My humanity had been consistently and systematically punished or pathologized.

So I had learned to be useful. Strong. Capable. Exhaustingly resourceful. Wholly self-reliant.
The one who never got to be carried and suffocated the parts of me that were longing for it.

So when mercy came—present, and without demand for me to contort in order to receive it—it felt like a threat to my entire nervous system which had been built on survival.

Dare I say that the availability of mercy actually felt tormenting on several levels??

And though driven by polar opposite motives, there were similarities between how my friend and her husband (who are now family to me) met me in my need that mirrored ways unsafe people had met me.

I didn't trust myself enough to tell truth from falsehood anymore and I struggled to trust them, because I knew the exhorbitant cost of being wrong in my character assessment.

My body buzzed and braced for shame, for rejection, for the 'catch' and ultimately, for the letdown of betrayal.

My brain believed one story to be true ... but my nervous system knew another.

I also struggled with knowing how to be human and how to allow other people to see me fully in my humanity.

You see, the care I’d received until this particular season of life had largely been shallow or transactional. Always quid pro quo. I was eligible to be loved only so far as I was willing to behave or believe how the giver of care would have me to.

Because that had been my experience multiple times over, I had given up hope that I’d ever find healing or real, soul level help in this lifetime.

And on some level, I believed that if someone helped me without their own agenda, I must have manipulated them into thinking I was worth it. That mercy would turn into control or disappointment or contempt once it saw the real me.

But mercy didn’t flinch at my lack of faith or distorted, often paradoxical beliefs. It just kept coming for me.

Through those mentors and then through others.

And I’ve been learning—slowly, beautifully, sturdily—
that receiving mercy is neither passive or weak.

It’s not reserved for those who “really” deserve it, and never me.
It’s not a failure to need it. And it’s not defeat to struggle in receiving it.

It’s a sacred gift to be in need of it.
And an act of defiance to gladly receive it.
It’s an entire reclaiming of your right to be human.

When mercy touches you at your core—it heals and releases you.
You can stop pretending you’re above need. You can start to settle internally.
And you can stop trying to save yourself by managing others.

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And then, you begin to neighbor differently.
From presence, not performance.
From connection in the present, not control for the future.

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But I wonder…is it just me?

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😬 Or have you ever flinched at or resisted mercy, too?
🔥💔 Not because you didn’t need or want it—but because it threatened the survival story you were living inside?

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In the rebellion of tenderness,
💥 Camille

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