Vachon Imagined

The day she decided to fight was just like any other day.

She was sitting in her car, the place where so many private ceremonies happen, music playing softly in the background as though it were some great solvent capable of dissolving confusion, fear, and doubt. And there, in that ordinary moment, she decided:

No. This time I will fight.

This time I will not stay silent.

It was a choice that would define years of her life—a pursuit of justice, a pursuit of accountability, a pursuit of holding powerful institutions responsible for the very values they preached but often failed to practice. They spoke of integrity, fairness, compassion, and truth. They celebrated them publicly. But living those values is far more difficult than speaking them. If they truly practiced what they preached, well… politics would become far less convenient.

Fighting for yourself, for what you believe, for the places where you have been wronged, is not always noble or brave in the way people imagine. Sometimes it looks like you on the bathroom floor. Sometimes it’s hiding in a bedroom closet. Sometimes it’s finding whatever corner of privacy you can and crying until your eyes swell shut, hoping you’ll figure out the puffiness later.

Sometimes courage is simply refusing to quit.

It is the decision to keep moving when every system that appears to care is quietly working against you. It is learning that justice is rarely swift. In my experience, it is heavy, burdensome, exhausting. It stretches across years—yes, years. Every so often, it offers a brief moment of relief before demanding more of you.

That is why so many people give up.

Not because what happened to them didn’t happen. Not because their suffering wasn’t real. But because bureaucracies are often created to protect people, and far too often they end up protecting themselves.

Yet once a person has truly made up their mind, not even their own emotional turmoil can stop them.

They look directly at the fear. They feel the grief, the exhaustion, the uncertainty. And then they say:

Just keep running the race.

Just keep doing the work.

And so they do.

That is what fighting for justice often becomes. Not a grand victory speech. Not a dramatic courtroom moment. But the daily practice of carrying the weight and moving forward anyway.

You take in the misery. You carry the burden. You endure the disappointment. And somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, you continue believing that something good will come from it.

Something extraordinary.

Seen and unseen.

Known and unknown.

Something greater than yourself.

And so you keep going.

You just keep going.