Vachon Imagined

I have a friend who has been talking lately, almost endlessly, about “taking her power back.” And I find myself quietly wondering—where exactly did it go? Did she misplace it, like my husband tends to misplace his wallet?

We live in a world of quick slogans. Take your power back. I get the appeal. It can puff your chest out, or it can collapse you into your chair for weeks on end, with only brief interruptions for the bathroom. But the idea of “taking back” something already implies, whether we admit it or not, that it was never truly held in the first place.

I prefer working with what I have.

What I have is a life marked by serious trauma in childhood and continuing into adulthood, including sexual abuse that still triggers me most intensely. I don’t know when I will be fully at peace with that—“any day now,” I tell myself, half in jest, half in exhaustion.

But what I do know is this: the less I judge—myself, you, my parents, the people who caused harm—the more space there is to relate to what is actually here. There is something inside me that doesn’t belong to anyone else, even if it has been shaped by others. I get to own it, look at it, examine it, draw it close, and then let it go into something larger than me.

That feels like a kind of luxury. Not because I am good, but because I am alive.

I breathe.

And I can.