Vachon Imagined

When your emotions start running you, nothing quite says “fear” like being so afraid of your own feelings that you outsource the consequences to other people.

At their core, emotions are just life doing notifications. Everything is energy—yes, even the feelings you’re currently pretending are “logically incorrect.” Emotions aren’t that different from your phone battery. They charge you, drain you, overheat, and occasionally die at 3% right before something important.

They’re running in the background all the time—like the electrical current of your heart, which, inconveniently, has rhythm, intelligence, and absolutely no respect for your schedule.

The problem isn’t that we have emotions. It’s that we don’t always have custody of them.

And yes, that includes you.

When I first met my own rage, it wasn’t exactly a gentle introduction. I didn’t grow up in a way that taught emotional literacy—I grew up in a way that suggested emotions were either ignored, punished, or vaguely referred to as “a phase.”

So I did what any emotionally untrained person might do: I went into law enforcement.

Because nothing says “I have a healthy relationship with discipline” like deciding you’ll personally enforce everyone else’s lack of it.

And when that switch flips—from “I am upset” to “I will now restore order immediately”—things tend to escalate quickly. Sometimes in under a nanosecond. And sometimes with consequences that are… permanently non-reversible.

Emotions, when unattended, behave like children with no caretaker. They don’t disappear just because you stopped looking at them. They simply start making decisions on your behalf.

So the real question becomes: how do you stop being possessed by them and start working with them?

Not by suppressing them. That just makes them louder.

Not by worshipping them either. That just makes them confusing.

But by becoming aware enough to recognize: “Oh. This is rage. This is fear. This is grief trying to drive a car.”

Self-awareness doesn’t eliminate emotion—it gives it supervision.

And something interesting happens there. You start to recognize patterns. You stop confusing intensity for truth. You stop mistaking impulse for justice.

There’s a kind of reverence that shows up when you can actually see what’s happening inside you without immediately acting it out on the outside world.

That’s what people call maturity, or sometimes just “not making things worse on purpose anymore.”

Real justice isn’t emotional combustion. It’s response without distortion. It’s giving back what life gives you in a form that creates clarity instead of chaos.

Because emotions don’t die. They don’t leave. They don’t retire.

They just keep speaking.

The only question is whether you’re going to translate them—or let them run the whole system.