Vachon Imagined

The language we speak isn’t yours. And to try to infiltrate the crowd without first learning its rules is not rebellion—it is exposure. It makes you look foolish. It makes you the fool.

There is a particular humiliation in reaching for belonging without having earned fluency in the world you are trying to enter. It is the cry of an immature child who has lost his lollipop in the middle of a crowded store, screaming for anyone—anyone at all—to locate it, to soothe him, to return him to ease.

He does not yet understand that the world does not reorganize itself around distress.

But something shifts as the child grows.

He stops looking for rescuers.

He stops trying to slip into worlds whose language he has not yet learned, whose codes he has not yet mastered, whose silence he cannot yet interpret.

Instead, he begins to practice.

To focus.

To discipline himself into understanding rather than demanding understanding from others.

And slowly, what once felt lost begins to reappear—not because the world changed, but because his relationship to it did.

Until one day, the lollipop returns at the slightest touch of a wrist and a whisper not known to most.

Not magic.

Not entitlement.

But fluency.