was something off? 🤔

HeyReader,

Have you ever walked away from an interaction that seemed normal on the outside... but left your body buzzing with discomfort?

Maybe nothing was overtly “wrong”.
Maybe they were polite—maybe you were.
But still, something felt off?

I was only a few hours into a five-day house and pet sit when a man—who turned out to be a neighbor—knocked on the front door and asked me to pass a tool along to the tenant living in the side unit.

I stepped through the shared laundry room, knocked on the tenant's half-open door, passed the tool along and introduced myself.

Within a minute, he was asking if I was married and inquiring about my connections to the area.
Moments later, he was sharing detailed stories — about his divorce, an upcoming funeral, the unsolicited nudes women send him on dating apps, and his favorite kind of dog.

Although I couldn’t name it all right then, his conversational pacing was strange. His emotional tone didn’t match his facial expressions or topics. The speed at which he jumped between the topics was disorienting.

His body language was…interesting. And his whole presence felt too at ease for the context—almost like he’d been expecting me.

Twice I gave social cues that I was wrapping up the interaction, and he expertly dropped in just enough emotional or mildly inappropriate content to reel me back in.

I didn’t feel afraid, necessarily.
Just… off-balance.
Uneasy.

The whole thing lasted maybe five minutes, but I walked away foggy-brained, unsettled, and unsure of what had just happened—wondering why I felt so on edge… and why I instinctively wanted to block the shared door with a chair.

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Maybe you know that feeling, too—the kind that leaves you walking away asking yourself,

"Was that weird, or was it just me?"

A few years ago, I would have ignored that feeling or gotten frustrated and critical with myself for having it. Because I really do want to love like Jesus and feelings like that just get in the way.

I would’ve blamed myself or spiritualized the whole thing and tried harder to be nice.

What if God sent me to engage with this man—to remind him that he’s seen, he’s loved, and he’s not alone?
And what if backing away in response to my discomfort meant blowing the opportunity?

Maybe you’ve wrestled with thoughts like that too—
especially if you’ve been taught that love always looks like availability, hospitality, and overriding your own discomfort for the sake of connection.

Maybe you’ve started to notice this too:

Love isn’t one-size-fits-all.
​And trusting what you feel in a moment is part of how you rightly discern how to love in response to it.

If you’ve wrestled with the instinct to stay and simply absorb discomfort—there’s probably a reason.

Maybe, like me, you were shaped to believe love meant being overly responsible for other people’s experiences.

But learning to love wisely has meant developing trust in what I feel in real time.

And maybe that’s where you are too—learning to listen to what you feel in the moment, and letting that shape how you show up... without abandoning yourself.

The shift doesn’t happen overnight.
But over time, it taught me to stop overriding my inner knowing.

Tomorrow, I’ll share how I’ve learned to navigate interactions like this––
not by defaulting to fear or performative niceness,
but by leaning on a deeper framework that keeps love discerning, nuanced, and grounded in truth.

Until then,

Camille

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