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My friend,
Perhaps you’re wondering…
Why is she hosting a conversation about Neighboring this Sunday? Why should I be part of it?
Because maybe—like me,
you’ve lived whole chapters of your life doing the best you could
without the ability to extract the truth of your story.
Because maybe––like me,
you were praised for your strength and resilience,
but you longed for rest and internal peace.
Because maybe––like me,
you were told to behave,
but not taught how to shepherd your brilliance.
Because maybe––like me,
you know what it’s like to live without it,
and have spent most of your life trying to earn it or build from what you’ve not often received.
When I was 15, I lived in a residential treatment center in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
The unit I lived on was for girls with “behavior issues not otherwise explained”—
which often simply means girls who carry deep pain with no safe place to put it.
Girls whose fire, grief, or brilliance refused to cooperate with the systems designed to contain them.
That was me.
Though labeled a delinquent, I wasn’t one inside
I was a girl whose survival-wired nervous system had run out of places to store the weight of betrayal, confusion, and injustice.
A girl whose creativity and conscience had no place to land—
and no one nearby who knew how to see through the behavior to ask about or tend to the story beneath it.
In other words, no one trained in Neighboring Intelligence.
One night, I was sitting on my bed talking with my roommate, Norma.
She was telling me—gleefully—about robbing her grandma.
And a question rose up in me so sharply it stole my breath:
Is this really what I’m doing with my life?
In that moment of raw clarity, I made a vow that I would carry in my bones for the next 25 years:
I will not waste my life.
And I didn’t.
I did the work. I cooperated. I graduated from the program.
Then I went on in adulthood to build, create, serve, lead.
I said yes to goodness wherever I could find it.
But somewhere in the mix… I missed a critical phase of sense-making and integration.
No one helped me make sense of the life I had lived—
or how I ended up in the system to begin with.
No one helped me root my experiences and sense of self in meaning, dignity, or truth.
The care I received taught me to comply, not to present my authentic self.
To perform, not to be known and loved, simply for existing in the world as me.
To domesticate my behavior—not to tell about the truth I knew.
There was no narrative to help me understand myself with honor.
No structure that called the fire in me sacred.
No presence that helped me stay grounded in mercy rather than ruled by shame.
And so while I produced good things—
what I lacked was the experience of being neighbored.
And without that, I never learned how to truly neighbor myself.
And when we’re not given that framework,
we end up simply spinning around in the structures that formed us—
even when they no longer reflect what we believe.
That’s how I lived.
Capable. Creative. Scrappy. Devoted.
But still carrying old agreements I didn’t know I’d made.
Until, nearly 25 years later, my nervous system finally tapped out.
Not because I failed at life, although that is how I interpreted it for a while.
But because my body refused to keep pretending I was free—
while still living according to a map written by pain and a bound conscience.
And I wonder…
How might my story have changed
if just a few people along the way had been fluent in Neighboring Intelligence—
if someone had modeled how to stay near,
how to tell the truth and still be loved,
how to help me name what was never mine to carry?
And I wonder…
How many other “delinquents” could be helped sooner—
and spared the compounding traumas and dramas—
if Neighboring Intelligence was the norm?
🧠 Naming: The Practice of Integrity-Rooted Accountability
The healing didn’t take hold when someone named it for me.
It began to stick when I did.
Not to cast blame—
but to live from the truth my body had known all along.
Naming what happened.
Naming what it cost.
Naming what I need now—
and what I refuse to carry forward.
Naming isn’t just about calling others back to themselves.
It’s also about calling ourselves back to reality—
and committing to live there with courage, clarity, and care.
It’s how we break from false narratives.
It’s how we reimagine what’s possible.
It’s how we take back the pen of our future.
So. That’s why I’m hosting this conversation.
Because these kinds of conversations can catalyze change,
Want in?
Hit reply and I’ll send you the Zoom link.
Let’s do this.
Camille
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