Asymmetric Grace

There’s a reason you can’t smell your own perfume.

You’re in it.

You’ve been in it so long your nervous system stopped registering it as information. It’s not gone — everyone around you knows it’s there — but you’ve lost access to it as something separate from yourself. Which just how immersion works.

My relationship with my body is like that. So deep, so long-held, so woven into the baseline of how I experience being alive that it stopped feeling like a belief a long time ago.

It just feels like fact.

Like weather.

Like the ground.

Which is why, when a client climbs onto my table and apologizes for their body, something in me goes slightly sideways.

‘Sorry about my stomach.’

‘I know I need to lose weight.’

‘I haven’t been taking care of myself.’

I hear these things and my first response — the honest one, before the clinical training kicks in — is something close to confusion.

Not judgment.

Not irritation.

Just a genuine, what are you apologizing for?

Because in that room, in that moment, I don’t see what they’re seeing. I see tissue. I see tension patterns. I see a person who made an appointment, showed up, and got on the table where apologies for existing are not part of the protocol

Here’s a thing I’ve had to reckon with:

I can’t access empathy for body shame by mirroring it. My own version is too internalized for that. It doesn’t live in me as something I can point to and say yes, I know that feeling — it lives in me as a fact about reality. As the water I swim

in.

So when someone externalizes it, speaks it out loud, offers it up as something they’re aware of and ashamed of, I genuinely have to find my way to them by a different route.

I have to reason toward what they’re experiencing rather than feel my way there directly.

And I always get there. But not the way you’d expect. What I arrive at isn’t sympathy exactly. It’s something more like — you have a story.

You have a history.

You have circumstances that brought you to this moment and this body and this particular relationship with both. That’s not abstract to me. I know what it means for life to leave marks. I know what it means to carry things in your body that your mind hasn’t finished processing.

You deserve grace for that. All of it. Every soft place, every apology, every moment of

bracing for a judgment that was never coming from me.

I can give that freely. Completely. Without reservation.

What’s strange — what I’m still sitting with — is that I cannot seem to extend the same grace the few inches inward to myself. The thing I offer without hesitation to every person on my table somehow cannot make that short journey home.

Maybe that’s the perfume problem again.

Too close to smell.

Too immersed to see clearly.

But here’s what I’ve noticed about what actually happens in the treatment room, underneath the translation and the reasoning and the arrival at grace: At some point I stop being fully myself.

There’s a moment — it doesn’t always announce itself — where my own internal narrative goes quiet. The running commentary, the assessments, the noise that lives in me as constant low-level weather. It recedes. And something else takes over.

Something that feels less like me and more like a conduit — a passage between this person and something larger. The way a mycelium network moves information between organisms without any single thread being the source of it. The way a medium steps back to let something move through rather than from them.

In that state, the asymmetry makes a different kind of sense. It’s not that I’m more generous than I am. It’s that I’m less present as the self who withholds. The wounded part steps aside.

What’s left is just — capacity. Attention. The ability to meet someone exactly where they are without needing them to be different.

I don’t fully understand it. I’m not sure I need to. What I know is that the grace is real, even if the route to it is strange. And that whatever I cannot yet give myself, I can still give you.

You’re safe on my table. Not despite what I carry. Maybe, somehow, because of it.